While the big Godot Engine 3.1 release isn't out yet (soon), they're already working out a list of exciting features for the next few versions.

Taking to Twitter, Godot Engine head honcho Juan Linietsky has been posting about their plans. Turns out, there's a lot. Some of it sounds incredibly exciting too for a free and open source game engine. Talking about it, they said their aim is to make "Godot 4.0 2D and 3D rendering top notch with nothing to envy from the big guys (but still keeping it as easy to use as always)".

Here's just some of the things we might see later this year:

Vulkan support

Add Shader caching

Tessellation shaders

Post-processing shader support

God-rays for directional light

Planar Reflections

LOD and texture/mesh streaming

Add batching to the GLES2 back-end

Make 2D lighting work in one pass, to increase performance

A more modern SSAO algorithm

Take a look at PhysX, now it's open source

That's simply a taster going by what they posted in pictures and from replies to others, for more that is going to be added to their list. There's loads more too, see this Twitter post as well as this one for the list. These are only the plans from one developer too, it's not counting all the other parts that will be working on in the next development cycles.

Looks like 2019 is going to be a pretty huge year for the Godot Engine team, hopefully we will begin to see more people use it, especially with the 3.1 release just around the corner which has a beta available already.

Learn more about Godot Engine on the official site.