Godot Port Update #9

Porting stats
Porting progress: ~90%
Hours with Godot: ~529h
Scripts transferred: 95
3D-assets transferred: 68
Audio files transferred: 243
Godot project size: 6.12GB

What are these Godot Port Updates?

Porting a game to another engine is a big and rather unique thing, so these post are my way of documenting this porting experience and giving some honest updates on how the porting process is going.

These posts are a weekly thing until all the core features have been ported and along with these posts there are also Patreon test builds each week. These test builds are directed to small audience and the main purpose is to get performance data and early feedback on the ported features.

What has been ported this week?

- Winter system
- Snow shaders
- Rain / Snow VFX
- Weather modes
- Thunder system
- Ambient zones
- Indoor weapon SFX variants
- New footsteps
- New ambient sounds
- Background music option
- Color settings
- Camera settings
- Mouse settings
- Inverted mouse option
- Completed settings menu

Winter mode

One of the main porting topics this last week was the winter system. This winter system involved multiple visual techniques and custom shaders to support dynamic winter effects in Godot.

Currently the winter is mostly a visual "add-on" but it will play a major role in the future of this project, so I wanted to include this early on to Godot.

Here's one of those winter themed screenshots, that I shared earlier with this new winter system.

Settings menu

Along with winter and other ported weather options like rain and thunder, I wanted to finalize the settings menu where you control those in this demo phase of the project.

I think the current demo / settings menu is now complete and it has all the main options that I wanted to include for this next demo with Godot.

Here's the current demo settings options that were all activated last week.

Audio improvements

There's currently bunch of new audio upgrades coming to the game and last week I also started implementing / testing some of those.

These upcoming upgrades include:
- New footsteps
- New ambient loops (nature)
- New ambient SFX effects (one shots)
- Area based audio effects

Improving audio stuff is always an iterative process and this will probably need multiple weeks to find the right tone for many of these new elements, but it will get there eventually.

In terms of audio related port topics, I also brought the ambient zone feature to Godot and that added indoor / outdoor audio effects (lowpass filters). With this ambient zone feature, I was also now able to activate custom indoor weapon tails for different caliber weapons, so the weapon sound profile is different whether you indoor or outdoor.

Building the maps (the fun part)

I think now all the major tech features are pretty much ported to Godot. There's some sub-features missing and small details, but the main features are all there and working.

I basically had this "port strategy", where I wanted to delay the map building process until I have all the demanding port topics (like weapon system, inventory, AI) first ready and only after this I would allow myself to start rebuilding the maps, which I consider to be the easy and fun part of this porting.

I'm going to fully start this map rebuilding process tomorrow and I have huge number of new assets and existing 3D-elements from the Unity build, so I'm really looking forward to start bringing those assets to Godot and see how the visuals will evolve, when the current "empty areas" are filled with visual details.

When the first public Godot demo is ready?

Basically there's some polishing needed for the AI and weapons in Godot but once I have those ready and there's one playable / fully rebuilt map, I will start preparing the next public demo with Godot.

Originally I had a 2-3 month port timeline calculation and general goal that I would have the first Godot demo ready before end of this year. I'm now pretty much ~95% confident that this timeline is totally valid and there will be that "extra Godot demo" available at the end of this month.

I don't see any possibility that something at this point could derail this porting process and I'm really excited for receiving the feedback with this new engine and in general getting this project "back in business" meaning where I left with Unity.

- Antti (Developer)