The open source, cross platform, easy to use, visual programming based game engine GDevelop just released version 5.1. We first checked out GDevelop years ago in our closer look series and the game engine has come a long way since. The 5.1 update is a cumulation of several smaller updates released over the previous 6 months and includes several new features.
New features to the core game engine, include:
- Vast improvements to the physics engine, including a switch to the WebAssemblyversion of Box2D.
- New tween actions for camera rotation and camera zoom (thanks arthuro555!)
- Huge improvements to tilemaps, including fixing of tilemaps with invalid resources and empty tile margins, placeholders for tilemaps with invalid resources, borders around the collision mask in the editor, and more.
- Collision masks for tilemaps have also been improved, with automatic reading of masks created by Tiled 1.9+, and the possibility of using multiple collision masks.
- An option to preload audio files without decoding them (thanks dos1!), so even if the connection is lost the file is available in cache, but without a huge performance hit for decoding which could cause lower-end devices to crash.
- Fixes for the physics engine contacts/collisions between objects, which were not detected when they happened shortly between frames.
- New touch conditions that make it possible to handle touch events without conflicting with the scene events sheet. Existing conditions will continue to work alongside these new conditions (backwards compatibility).
- A new action to specify the camera is inside a set boundary.
- Size actions and conditions for Sprites and Tiled Sprites have been added.
- Fixes for the raycast condition.
- Custom collision masks support for the draggable behavior.
- Automatic generation of a WebManifest for exported web games (thanks @arthuro555!) – so that games have a proper icon and orientation when a shortcut is added to the home screen on Android or iOS.
- Dozens of improvements to the P2P extension.
- Allow to wait for a network request action to end before running other actions (thanks @arthuro555!).
- Add a toggle to show community made (unreviewed) extensions when browsing extensions.
- Various speed improvements and improved drag’n’drop of events in the events sheet.
- And more!
There were also several infrastructure based improvements, including new cloud based features such as leaderboards, online/synced projects, user authentication and more. There are also several improvements to the onboarding experience for new users, additions to game templates and the integrated asset store.
Key Links
You can learn more about the GDevelop 5.1 release and see it in action in the video below.