Everything in Flux 1.1.38

Save slots that come back exactly as they went in.

Exact

Whole numbers stay whole, decimals keep every digit, and vectors and colours come back as themselves.

Versioned

When what a game saves changes, a small upgrade step brings old saves forward on load. A save from a newer version is refused with a clear message, never half-loaded.

Never lost

The save before is kept as a backup, and a save cut short by a crash or a damaged file falls back to the newest good copy. Every file is checksummed, and saves can never carry code.

Large worlds, no pause

A strategy game's whole world saves compressed on another core while the game plays on, a 4 MB world to 1.1 MB. A Saves dock in the editor shows what each slot holds.

Each setting defined once, with its default, its limits and what it changes in the game.

Only what the player changed

The file holds only the player's changes, so a better default in a later update reaches everyone who never touched it. A hand-edited or old file never breaks the game.

Audio and display, ready-made

A volume for every bus, window mode, vsync, frame cap, render scale with FSR sharpening and anti-aliasing. A game sets its own display defaults in one line, and opens on the monitor it was last moved to.

Quality presets

Low, Medium, High and Ultra, or Custom: one choice sets the render scale, the upscaler, anti-aliasing and the quality of shadows, bounced light, reflections, fog and motion blur. A game can bring presets of its own.

The game's look stays the game's

Quality never switches on an effect the scene does not use, and Ultra gives the heavy ones back exactly as the art had them.

Only what the renderer draws

The 3D template's Graphics tab hides what Forward+, Mobile or Compatibility cannot draw. A scene with every effect on took 0.07 ms of the GPU at Low and 1.22 ms at Ultra on Flux's test machine.

Rebinding, button prompts, rumble and local co-op with a pad each.

Rebind anything

Keyboard, mouse and gamepad, with a main and an alternate binding per action. Moving onto a key another action uses swaps the two, so nothing ever does two things.

Prompts that name the right thing

The key printed on the player's own keyboard layout, and Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo names on a pad, switching as they move between keyboard and gamepad.

Local co-op, a pad each

Up to four players at one screen, each read on their own device only. A player joins with A on a free pad, and an unplugged pad keeps its player's seat until a pad is plugged back in.

Rumble that feels right

Each hit rumbles the pad's two motors and fades away, and a burst of hits stays one firm rumble. It goes quiet while the game is paused, and the player's Vibration setting turns it down or off.

Games in as many languages as they need, from one table a translator can open in any spreadsheet.

Switch while playing

Every text on screen changes at once, menus over a paused game included. The first time, the game picks the language closest to the player's own system.

Listed by its own name

Deutsch, not German, so a player who cannot read the current language still finds theirs. A new language is one more column in the table.

What is still missing

A Localization panel shows what each language lacks and catches the usual table mistakes. While a game is tested, it notes every text it showed with no translation yet.

The player's volumes on top of the sound designer's mix, so turning the music down never undoes their balance.

Snapshots

Named changes to the mix, such as a pause menu that drops the music and muffles the world, or a cave with more echo, that fade in and out and stack.

Music that carries on

Crossfades from track to track and carries on across scene changes and under the pause menu.

The player's own output

Players pick the speakers or headphones the game plays through, and can mute it while they are in another window.

Sounds that tidy up

A sound played once frees itself, a sound played many times at once is held to a sensible number of copies, and loops fade on and off.

Subtitles and captions, larger text, colour-blind filters and mono sound.

Subtitles and captions

Speech with the speaker's name and captions for sounds, at a size and background the player picks. They wait while the game is paused, translate like any text, and a screen reader reads them out.

Text from 100% to 200%

Every menu, list and HUD grows at once, and the template's menus make room for it.

Colour-blind filters

For protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia at a strength the player picks. A studio can give its own colours a version for each kind instead.

Mono sound and screen readers

Mono for players who hear with one ear, and every setting in the template read out with its name, such as "Language: English".

Sessions over the local network and Steam, up to 32 players, and the game going on when the host goes.

Always in a session

A game played alone is a session of one, so hosting turns the running game into a session others join, with no reload.

One list of every game

Games on the local network, Steam's public lobbies and the servers on Steam's list come back as one list, joined the same way. Quick Match finds the player a game with company, or hosts one.

A join that says why

A full session, another version of the game or a player who wasn't invited is turned away with the reason, before they see the world. Old and new builds of Flux never half-join.

Things the game makes, for everyone

The host puts crates, balls and enemies in the world, and every player sees the same thing, a player who joins late included. Networked Object sets a scene up in one dialog.

Smooth on a real connection

Movement plays back a tenth of a second behind, so late or lost packets never show as stutter. Measured with 32 cars, a ram is felt on the rammer's screen on the same tick as the host's at up to 200 ms of lag.

32 players in a session

Tested with 32 at once: everyone joining in under a second, the 33rd told it's full, and voice heard by everyone. 32 cars cost a player about 14 KB/s.

The game goes on when the host goes

A game turns it on, and when the host quits or drops, the next player takes over with the world as it was on their screen, on the local network and over Steam. A player who drops keeps their place for a minute and gets back in by themselves.

Dedicated servers

A game can run as a server with no player of its own, keep running with nobody in, and take commands at its console.

Tools for finding what went wrong

In a test run the debugger sets a bad connection for each copy, lists who owns every networked thing, logs every message in plain words and flags anything that drifts apart between players.

The right App ID for every build, lobbies and invites, servers on Steam's list and builds ready to upload.

The right App ID for every build

Development, demo, playtest and release are listed once, and every build picks its own. A Steam menu on the toolbar runs the editor as any of them.

Warnings before a mistake ships

A demo sharing the release App ID, Valve's test game as the release ID or a debug build on release is flagged. A GodotSteam that has changed leaves Steam off with one warning instead of failing mid-play.

Ready for Steam's upload tool

Every export that can go to Steam gets the script steamcmd uploads it with, aimed at the right App ID and depot. A debug build can never go up by mistake.

Lobbies, invites and friends

Friends-only or public lobbies, invites, an in-game friends list, players' Steam pictures and a list of public games. Every connection goes through Steam's relay, so players' IP addresses stay private.

Servers on Steam's list

A dedicated server goes on Steam's own list, so players find it from anywhere, and Steam checks every player before they're let in. Nothing of Wrenchy Productions' has to run for it.

Steam stays optional

A game without GodotSteam, or a player without Steam running, plays on without it.

The same calls on Steam or with no platform at all.

All in one file

achievements.cfg defines each achievement, stat and leaderboard. An Achievements panel edits them and copies them out in the order Steamworks asks for.

Tested while the game runs

The debugger's Achievements tab shows every achievement and stat as it changes, awards or resets them, and submits a test score.

Leaderboards with names and places

Best or latest score, times shown as 1:05.250, and the top, the scores around the player's, or their friends'.

Works from day one

On Valve's test App ID everything is kept on the player's machine. As the game starts on Steam, it names whatever Steam and the game disagree on.

Voice for any multiplayer game on Windows, over the game's own session, with no outside service to sign up for or pay.

Clear voices

Background noise is taken out before anything is sent, and voices go as Opus, about 3 KB a second for each player talking.

Open mic or push to talk

With a mic volume and a threshold so breathing and room noise stay home, and the start and end of every word kept.

Heard from where players are

In 2D or 3D, fading with distance, or flat for a lobby. Voices play a moment behind, so a bad connection never breaks them up.

A mic test

It plays your voice back exactly as the others hear it. The microphone opens only when someone could hear it, never in a solo game.

A report on every run that closed unexpectedly, kept on the player's PC.

What it keeps

Whether the game crashed, the game, engine and addon versions, the PC, graphics card and screen, what the game was doing, its last errors and its log.

The player is told

The main menu says the game closed unexpectedly, that a report was kept and nothing was sent anywhere, with a button that opens the folder to send it.

No personal details

Home folders, user and computer names, e-mail and IP addresses, Steam IDs, keys and the names of everyone in the game are taken out before a report is written.

Read in the editor

Read Crash Report opens a report a player sent, and the editor of the game's build names the engine function and file behind each line.

About 30 checks on the exact build that goes out, and stages only an approver moves a build past.

It checks the build that goes out

One button or one command makes the release build, reads back what went into it and starts it, so what passed is what gets uploaded.

It plays the build

The game's own smoke test plays the release build: the menus, a game saved and loaded, and for a multiplayer game hosting and joining. A template game's build plays its whole test in 2 to 10 seconds.

What it catches

A game still named "New Game", missing files, scripts that do not compile, the wrong engine build, a release on Valve's test App ID, missing licences, anything named like a key inside the build, and a build that plays differently from the project.

A report to approve from

The engine build, every addon's version, the game's commit and a SHA-256 fingerprint of every file in the build.

Build stages

Development, internal testing, external testing, release candidate and approved release, kept in the game's own releases.cfg in git. A build changed after its check cannot be marked until it is checked again.

Approvals that can't be faked

Only an approver sends a build out of the team, and each approval is signed with the approver's key over the exact build files. A record edited by hand shows in red.

Test builds in one click

A debug build exported, checked to start and zipped to hand out. It keeps its saves and logs apart from the tester's own copy, and every screenshot names the build in a corner.

Budgets a team sets for its game, measured while it runs and held in the release check.

Budgets

The frame rate to hold, memory and video memory, how long it may take to start and to load a level, and what it may send each player, defaulting to 60 fps, 2 GB, 1 GB, 10 seconds and 5 seconds.

Told the moment one is missed

In the game's log, and in a test run as a warning in the debugger with live graphs of every budget.

Judged fairly

A frame budget is kept when 95 frames in 100 make it, so one hitch on a busy machine doesn't count against a game, while steady stutter does.

How busy the machine is

The processor time the game takes and each of its threads' share by name, read once a second on Windows, release builds included.

Every asset checked the way the build will have it.

What it finds

Failed imports, files a scene uses that are not there, textures over the game's size limit, uncompressed textures or sounds over its memory limit, and folders imported different ways.

In the editor and as it comes in

Check Assets lists every problem a double-click from its file, and an asset is checked as the editor imports it.

Each folder imports its own way

A folder's rule comes from a preset (2D art, 3D textures, normal maps, sound effects, voice lines, music), every new asset follows it, and Fix Imports puts every asset right in one click.

See the running game another way: wireframe, overdraw, light, levels of detail and collision shapes.

Views in the running game

F4 moves through the wireframe, which way surfaces face, overdraw, the light alone, lights per mesh and each mesh's level of detail.

Lighting problems spelled out

Lights per mesh paints any mesh past Mobile and Compatibility's limit of 8 lights magenta, so a missing light in a VR or mobile game is found in seconds.

Collision shapes on and off

Shift+F4 draws every physics body's real shapes in 2D and 3D as the game runs, and hides them again.

Gone from release builds

It works in the editor's runs, test builds and debug exports. The debugger's Overlays tab switches the game to any view the engine has.

Tested shaders, presets, a material generator, looks, art directions and lighting setups, all starting points a game picks.

20 shaders, alike on every renderer

Outlines, toon lighting, water, swaying grass, hit flashes, dissolves, ground fog, force fields, holograms and more, each drawn alike on Forward+, Mobile and Compatibility and checked on all three.

Effects in one line

A hit flash, a dissolve, a highlight or an outline goes on a character with one line and comes off leaving its materials as they were. A hundred flashing enemies cost no more than one.

51 presets and a material generator

Presets picked from pictures without writing shader code, and materials made from an art style, what the surface is and what it needs, or from a texture set found by its names.

Checked and measured

Check Shaders reads every shader the way each renderer the game runs on reads it, and Profile Shaders times every material over a 1080p screen, most expensive first.

Looks and art directions

17 post-processing looks and seven art directions, Cinematic, Realistic, Cel-shaded, Stylized, Low-poly, Retro and Horror, each shown in pictures and put on the game in one step Undo takes back.

Lit as its style is

Every art direction but Retro brings a lighting setup and the reflections that suit it. Cinematic has golden hour, and in a game with ray tracing its reflections, shadows and bounced light are all traced.

Lighting setups

Six, for a time of day and a place, each lighting the open scene and baking its light. A script blends a running game from day to night.

Motion blur

What moves across the view smeared along its motion, about 0.16 ms of the GPU at 1920x1080 on the test machine, on Forward+.

Starting points, not a look

Nothing changes how a game looks until it asks.

Cutscenes made in Godot's own animation editor, and broken animations found before a player sees them.

Add a Cutscene node

Its camera takes the view and glides back to the player's, black bars come in, its lines show in the subtitles, and the controls and HUD go off while it plays.

Hold to skip

A skipped cutscene ends exactly where it would have, and the ones a player has seen go in their save.

Animation checks

Check Animations follows every track of every animation to what it moves, so a renamed node or a changed bone is caught. The release check holds every build to it.

Menus a gamepad player is never lost in, and every screen checked the way a player without a mouse meets it.

Screens that keep the focus

A screen opens on its first button and gives the focus back when it closes, and B closes only the screen on top. Every template's menus press with A and go back with B.

Walked like a gamepad

Check UI opens every screen with the game running and walks it as the arrow keys and a stick do, naming anything a gamepad can never reach.

Bigger text, checked

Every screen laid out again with its text twice as large, naming anything that runs off the screen or is cut short.

One node over an object, its distances worked out from its size.

Drop one node over an object

A house swaps for a simple stand-in at about 100 m, and small clutter like a crate drops out at about 80 m, on Godot's own visibility ranges and mesh LOD.

No popping, no ghosting

Every switch is a clean cut that waits a few metres before it undoes, so standing on the line never flickers.

Fewer draw calls, and occlusion

A house of twenty pieces draws in a few calls. Set Up Occlusion bakes an occluder from the open scene in one click.

Measured

A town of 400 houses: 6002 objects and 1.5 million triangles plain, 528 objects and 45 thousand triangles with LOD, the CPU time of a frame down from 4.4 ms to 0.8 ms on Forward+.

A world of any size that holds only what is close.

Cut into cells in one go

Cut Scene into Cells says first what stays loaded and every link the cut would break, and leaves the scene as it was.

Only what's near is loaded

Cells round the player load on other threads, ahead of where they're heading, with stand-ins out to 2 km so the horizon is never empty.

Exact a long way out

The world moves its origin to the player, so positions stay exact to a fraction of a millimetre. A pickup taken stays gone when its cell loads again.

Measured

144 cells flown over at 80 m/s, every cell near the camera in on every frame, the longest frame 8 ms on Forward+ and under 5 ms on Mobile and Compatibility.

A grand strategy map from one painted picture.

Read on every core

A 4096x2048 map of 3000 provinces reads in about a third of a second, and up to 65,536 provinces fit.

Map modes in half a millisecond

Switching from political to terrain repaints every province at once, the same at 300 provinces as at 30,000, on every renderer.

Borders and a camera

A strong border wherever two owners meet, the province under the mouse lit, and a strategy camera that never scrolls off the world.

A world that works out its ticks on other cores and never stops the frame.

No frame lost

A month that takes half a second costs no frame: on Flux's tests the frames go on at the screen's pace while it runs.

Every core, the same result

One call splits a table of a hundred thousand rows among every core, and the world comes out exactly the same on a 4-core laptop and a 32-core desktop.

A paint shop on any model: a car, a helmet, a board.

A brush in centimetres

A 12 cm brush is 12 cm wherever it lands, across the texture's seams and round corners, never through a thin panel.

Small to save and send

Nine bytes a point, so a whole livery is a few kilobytes, and a 5000-point job draws in one frame.

On every renderer

Each stroke is drawn on the graphics card the frame it's painted, on Forward+, Mobile and Compatibility.

A map editor inside the game itself.

The game's own pieces

Placed with the mouse, dragged, turned and raised with snapping, and roads laid as straights and bends that climb and bank.

Every change undone

Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y for every placement, drag, setting and road piece, and Test drive to play the level and come back.

Safe to share

A level is a small file of plain values, never code, so a map from anywhere can't run code in the game.

Reflections, shadows and bounced light traced on the graphics card's ray tracing hardware.

Reflections of the whole world

Every smooth surface mirrors what the camera can't see: the cars behind yours in its paint, the sky behind the camera in a wet road. The whole 1080p view as a mirror costs a quarter of a millisecond more than screen-space reflections.

Shadows traced too

No blocky edges and no shadows that stop a few hundred metres out, sharp where a thing meets the ground and softer as it reaches away. The sun and two lamps cost under a millisecond more than shadow maps.

Light that bounces off moving things

A car lights the road under it in its paint's colour and picks up the colour of the walls it passes, about one and a half milliseconds for the whole 1080p view.

Where it runs

On NVIDIA RTX, AMD RX 6000 and newer and Intel Arc. On a card without ray tracing, on Mobile and Compatibility and in VR, it does nothing and the game draws as before.

C++ and C beside GDScript and C#, built, run and swapped in without leaving Flux.

C++ without leaving Flux

New C++ Project adds a program, a library or a GDExtension library, and the C++ panel builds it, runs it and lists its errors. Its files open in a C++ screen beside 2D, 3D and Script.

clangd as you type

Errors as you type, completion, go to definition, references, rename, fixes and refactors, and Shift+Alt+F to format in Godot's own style.

A game's own code in C++, or C

A GDExtension library is a class the game uses like any node. Build it again and the editor swaps the new code in, the open scenes keeping their settings. The same in C on flux-c, with no Python and no godot-cpp to install.

Standards and libraries

C++20 or C++23, C17 or C23, picked in flux.cfg, and libraries from vcpkg named there, the whole team on the same versions.

Built inside every release

The release check builds the game's C++ for release before it exports, so what goes out is the code as it is now.

Fast, with nothing to download

godot-cpp comes with every build, and Flux finds Visual Studio, clang-cl, CMake and Ninja itself. A small project configures in about 1.5 s and builds in half a second.

What every other framework stands on.

The manifest

Reads and checks flux.cfg, names the build the editor is running, powers the editor's warnings, and puts the manifest into every export.

The C#

Writes the C# every addon carries from its GDScript, and the C# for a game's own GDScript whenever one of its scripts is saved.