Godot 4 Beta 4 is out!

I am excited to announce the course is highlighted in the beta 4 official blog post! Along with that the course itself is updated to run on Beta 4. 

Beta 3 was released while I was amid some hefty improvements to the visuals and animations in the course, but thankfully I got those wrapped up in time to align with Beta 4’s release.   

Visual improvements   

I have been busy improving the water shader using visual shaders. I was able to put out a matching video to go along with that you can check out below! 

But that only covers the basics, I am working on a follow up video about utilizing the depth buffer, as that has changed in Godot 4, but lets you add simple ripples where the water meets surfaces.   

Improved animations 

I finally introduced KayKit animations kit into the course, giving Ducky access to many premium animations. I spent some time tweaking the character controller to better fit these animations. 
 
In fact, a built-in set of combat animations made it quite easy to add some combat to our little lead duck, try not to be too intimidated by his swordplay prowess.   

  This still needs some more polish, but you can equip the sword at any time by pressing "e", then attack with "left click" .

My plight with slopes   

Spending intimate time focusing on animations led to trying to tackle a personal bugbear with RigidBody player characters, travelling up slopes.   

As forces are applied to the player relative to the character a lot of force is lost when trying to walk up a slope leading to slow climbs – but I have now made some adjustments, so the player moves relative to the slope they are standing on.   

What’s next   

I’m still working on written guides and the video I mentioned earlier, but I currently have some plans to better gamify the demo levels I currently have, hoping to show some of that soon. 

Thank you all and see you in the next one!