As many open source projects have started doing it, we're removing the
current year from the copyright notice, so that we don't need to bump
it every year.
It seems like only the first year of publication is technically
relevant for copyright notices, and even that seems to be something
that many companies stopped listing altogether (in a version controlled
codebase, the commits are a much better source of date of publication
than a hardcoded copyright statement).
We also now list Godot Engine contributors first as we're collectively
the current maintainers of the project, and we clarify that the
"exclusive" copyright of the co-founders covers the timespan before
opensourcing (their further contributions are included as part of Godot
Engine contributors).
Also fixed "cf." Frenchism - it's meant as "refer to / see".
Previously, only forward basis distance from the camera was used.
This means that unnecessarily high LOD levels were used for objects located to the side of the camera.
The distance from the camera origin is now used, independently of direction.
Not sure why I didn't get those before, it may be due to upstream
changes (12.2.1 is a moving target, it's basically 12.3-dev), or simply
rebuilding Godot from scratch with different options.
This allows light sources to be specified in physical light units in addition to the regular energy multiplier. In order to avoid loss of precision at high values, brightness values are premultiplied by an exposure normalization value.
In support of Physical Light Units this PR also renames CameraEffects to CameraAttributes.
Per-light energy gives more control to the user on the final result of
volumetric fog. Specific lights can be fully excluded from volumetric fog
by setting their volumetric fog energy to 0, which improves performance
slightly. This can also be used to prevent short-lived dynamic effects
from poorly interacting with volumetric fog, as it's updated over several
frames by default unless temporal reprojection is disabled.
Volumetric fog shadows now obey Light3D's Shadow Opacity property as well.
The shadow fog fade property was removed as it had little visible impact
on the final scene's rendering.
This provides a benefit similar to FSR 1.0 (greater texture sharpness
at the cost of some graininess at sub-native resolution scales), but
without the added performance cost of FSR 1.0.
This can be used to make shadows translucent for a specific light.
The light distance fade system also uses this to smoothly fade the shadow
when the light fade transition distance is greater than 0.
Mipmap LOD bias can be useful to improve the appearance of distant
textures without increasing anisotropic filtering (or in situations
where anisotropic filtering is not effective).
`fsr_mipmap_bias` was renamed to `texture_mipmap_bias` accordingly.
The property hint now allows for greater precision as well.
Implement built-in classes Vector4, Vector4i and Projection.
* Two versions of Vector4 (float and integer).
* A Projection class, which is a 4x4 matrix specialized in projection types.
These types have been requested for a long time, but given they were very corner case they were not added before.
Because in Godot 4, reimplementing parts of the rendering engine is now possible, access to these types (heavily used by the rendering code) becomes a necessity.
**Q**: Why Projection and not Matrix4?
**A**: Godot does not use Matrix2, Matrix3, Matrix4x3, etc. naming convention because, within the engine, these types always have a *purpose*. As such, Godot names them: Transform2D, Transform3D or Basis. In this case, this 4x4 matrix is _always_ used as a _Projection_, hence the naming.
