Thanks for the info, very useful (would upvote, but I still don't have enough points for that).
I'm kinda simultaneously sad that it's not yet ready in 4.0 and hopeful about them working on it for some later 4.x version. But in the meantime, that unfortunately means that for anyone wanting to do a game where skeletal 3D animation+IK is required (i.e. most 3D games where you would see humans), Godot is still not a viable option, though hopefully getting there.
The other point that makes me think that Godot (much as I think it's a great project) is probably not the right thing for my requirements is their very opinionated architectural decisions about rendering… which are understandable for their goal of providing a low barrier to entry and reduced learning curve for many common use cases, but make it harder to customize and adapt to other requirements.
specifically: their way of encapsulating all rendering into a separate server with a rather high wall between that and the code of the game developer… is probably not compatible with what I want to do, which requires blending externally pre-rendered background/environment images with animated 3d characters and assets.
So currently, I'm thinking of probably not going with a batteries-included encapsulated game engine like Godot but instead using a render engine (like Filament, Ogre3D Next or The Forge) with a character animation engine like Ozz-Animation.
I'm kinda simultaneously sad that it's not yet ready in 4.0 and hopeful about them working on it for some later 4.x version. But in the meantime, that unfortunately means that for anyone wanting to do a game where skeletal 3D animation+IK is required (i.e. most 3D games where you would see humans), Godot is still not a viable option, though hopefully getting there.
The other point that makes me think that Godot (much as I think it's a great project) is probably not the right thing for my requirements is their very opinionated architectural decisions about rendering… which are understandable for their goal of providing a low barrier to entry and reduced learning curve for many common use cases, but make it harder to customize and adapt to other requirements.
specifically: their way of encapsulating all rendering into a separate server with a rather high wall between that and the code of the game developer… is probably not compatible with what I want to do, which requires blending externally pre-rendered background/environment images with animated 3d characters and assets.
So currently, I'm thinking of probably not going with a batteries-included encapsulated game engine like Godot but instead using a render engine (like Filament, Ogre3D Next or The Forge) with a character animation engine like Ozz-Animation.