Less freezing, better physics, and Godot 4.5

After finishing this project in September of 2024 (that long ago?!) the engine that it’s using, Godot, has undergone a few significant updates. I finally got around to bumping the version to the latest!

This project was originally using Godot 4.2, now it’s using godot 4.5. That’s a lot of .! On top of that, I added a loading screen and did some nasty tricks to try and reduce stuttering.

A list of changes…

The physics engine has been switched from Godot’s custom-made physics to Jolt physics ⚡️

That’s right, the same physics engine that powers AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West now simulates floppy pizza slices in your browser. We are truly living in the future. 🔮

This doesn’t have any real impact on the gameplay, other than a bit more stability.

With Godot 4.4, 3D physics interpolation has finally been added back to the engine! 🥳

Physics interpolation used to be in the engine Godot 3, but took a bit to port over to Godot 4.

What is physics interpolation?

In Godot, rendering the scene happens in one process and simulating the physics happens in another process. The physics simulation happens at a fixed timestep, but the rendering time can vary. When the rendering process gets far behind the physics process (for example, on slower machines) it causes moving objects to “jitter”. Physics interpolation “smooths” out the positions of moving objects so that they don’t jitter!

Previously, this project was using an add-on to do this manually, but now it’s built-in to the engine which means it works better and things are a lot simpler on my end!

There is now an actual loading screen for this game! 😵‍💫

Something secret and sinister also happens now before the loading screen goes away - the camera spins around a few times so that it sees everything.

Godot performs something called frustum culling when rendering the scene, so only objects that are visible are actually rendered. When an object is first rendered, Godot has to compile the shaders for that object, which causes a split-second of stuttering. This is painfully obvious when running in the browser.

By spinning the camera around before removing the loading screen, Godot is basically “tricked” into rendering that object and compiling the shaders for it.

Phantom camera updates 👻 🎥

This project uses the amazing Phantom Camera add-on, which has undergone a ton of improvements since this game released… in part because I kept finding bugs while making this game 😅 But the amazing thing about open source - you find a bug, you can fix it!

I’m also making some great progress on the full, real Offworld Pizza game, which is a third-person shooter very different from this mini-game, so look out for updates on that soon!

That’s it! Enjoy your pizza before it gets cold!