Godot 4.0 is released, and will come to Steam in a few days!
After 3+ years of breaking and rebuilding from the ground up, a complete core overhaul and a full engine rewrite, through 17 alphas, 17 betas and 6 release candidates, we're thrilled to announce that Godot 4.0 is out!
This is an achievement that we want to dedicate to our entire community — contributors, testers, and users like yourself! Together we create opportunities for many developers to make beautiful and creative games and apps, for free and with a refreshing ease. Godot 4 continues on that promise, improves all of the engine's areas, and begins a new cycle. It will serve as a foundation for many new releases in the future.
This is a new major release of Godot. This means that existing Godot 3 projects are not compatible with Godot 4. While Godot 4.0 comes with a built-in project convertor, adapting your games to the new version of the engine still requires manual labor on top of that. Some things need to be redone from scratch. Thus, upgrading requires some consideration, and for projects deep in development it's likely better to stay on Godot 3.
For that reason, Godot 4.0 will not be immediately available on Steam for all users, to prevent auto-updates from destroying your work (always do backups and use a Version Control System). Instead, for the next week you have time to decide if you want to start using Godot 4, or if you want to stick to Godot 3. Whichever you decide, go to the application settings for Godot Engine, select the Betas tab, and pick the branch that you want to use: the new stable-4.0 or the old and trusted stable-3.5 (or any previous version branch, we have all of them).
After a week has passed we will enable Godot 4.0 to all users on the default branch, so make sure to switch to stable-3.5 if you intend to keep using it.
You can also download either version from the Godot website if you want to keep using multiple versions in parallel (Godot 4.0, Godot 3.x).
Well, that's enough precautions! At this point, you probably want to know what's so exciting about Godot 4. Read our biggest release blog post yet to learn all about new features and enhancements.
This is an achievement that we want to dedicate to our entire community — contributors, testers, and users like yourself! Together we create opportunities for many developers to make beautiful and creative games and apps, for free and with a refreshing ease. Godot 4 continues on that promise, improves all of the engine's areas, and begins a new cycle. It will serve as a foundation for many new releases in the future.
This is a new major release of Godot. This means that existing Godot 3 projects are not compatible with Godot 4. While Godot 4.0 comes with a built-in project convertor, adapting your games to the new version of the engine still requires manual labor on top of that. Some things need to be redone from scratch. Thus, upgrading requires some consideration, and for projects deep in development it's likely better to stay on Godot 3.
For that reason, Godot 4.0 will not be immediately available on Steam for all users, to prevent auto-updates from destroying your work (always do backups and use a Version Control System). Instead, for the next week you have time to decide if you want to start using Godot 4, or if you want to stick to Godot 3. Whichever you decide, go to the application settings for Godot Engine, select the Betas tab, and pick the branch that you want to use: the new stable-4.0 or the old and trusted stable-3.5 (or any previous version branch, we have all of them).
After a week has passed we will enable Godot 4.0 to all users on the default branch, so make sure to switch to stable-3.5 if you intend to keep using it.
You can also download either version from the Godot website if you want to keep using multiple versions in parallel (Godot 4.0, Godot 3.x).
Well, that's enough precautions! At this point, you probably want to know what's so exciting about Godot 4. Read our biggest release blog post yet to learn all about new features and enhancements.