• 3D

  • Will Godot 4 improve the speed of Gridmap for Voxel games?

I'm building a 2D isometric game like Diablo 2, but I'm using a 3D engine and I want to have user peaceable voxels.

I'm trying to decide if I want to use Godot's gridmap, or if I wana use the c++ voxel engine (https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel). I know Zylanns engine is super fast, but I'm worried I'm falling into the trap of premature optimization.

Should I quickly try to create a stress test in gridmap? Will Godot 4 effect this performance at all?

It would be a real pain to have to switch voxel engines later on.

Also in the game I would want to have the option to zoom out a lot, but if you zoom out that much I can pause gameplay since you wont be able to see your character anymore so it would save on performance.

Unlike TileMap, GridMap will not get a significant rework for 4.0 due to time constraints. When using GridMaps, there are some performance caveats you should be aware of (such as setting its Octant size to 1, which tends to improve performance in many scenarios)).

That said, GridMaps are not recommended for real-time "voxel" purposes, as they were never designed for that. Vulkan will make draw calls cheaper, but I doubt you will be able to use huge GridMaps that are frequently modified. Also, it goes without saying that you'll need to perform greedy meshing of some kind :)