There’s a lot of new stuff, especially for developers. Here’s the link to the beta news post.
Visually, our greatest advancement has been getting shadows to work at vastly different distance scales, from the rings of Saturn to small spacecraft (at the same time).
Look closely! You can see the ring’s semi-transparency in its shadow!
I, Voyager is free and open source. It’s just me at this time but I’d love to have other developers involved! Here are links:
Many. Shadows was the longest unsolved issue. The only way to have them working over large scale differences is to use shadow masking and multiple lights. Then for Saturn’s rings we have multiple shadow casters to fake semi-transparency.
The technical trick I’m most proud of is asteroid points that are vertex shaders. Each vertex knows its own orbital elements and calculates its own position each frame. A good laptop can display our 70000+ orbiting asteroids and a real gaming desktop can display >1 million.
Mind if I ask, do you calculate the planets’ positions within Godot or do you use an external library?