Godot Engine News

With the Godot 4.1 release on the horizon, contributors have been hard at work on major and exciting improvements to the engine. But we appreciate that many of you would like to have your experience a little less exciting and a bit more stable when using Godot 4 in production. To that end, we try to backport as many useful fixes as we can to improve your workflows, and the new Godot 4.0.3 release is the result of these efforts.

Almost every area was touched upon with bugfixes and stability improvements. This includes multiple crashes and glitches eliminated in constructive solid geometry (CSG), GDScript language server, importing of assets, and all things related to rendering and visuals. Several reported platform-specific crashes and freezes were addressed, especially on Android and Windows. And of course there were improvements to the overall user experience and documentation. The latter received a massive bump in completeness thanks to a serious effort from Calinou, who updated a lot of descriptions in the rendering API.

See the release blog post for more details.

Note: We forgot to post updates here when uploading the previous 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 maintenance releases – see their respective blog posts (4.0.1, 4.0.2) for details.

The illustration picture for this release comes from the Godot Juice course by MrEliptik. It's a great primer on adding juicy visual effects to your Godot 4 projects from the creator of Dashpong, and you can be sure it's based on practical experience! It's available on itch.io and Udemy.

As we announced last week, Godot 4.0 has been released!

Read the official release announcement on the Godot blog for all the details on what's new.

There is also an amazing video by GDQuest covering the new features:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As it's a major update which breaks compatibility with existing projects, we delayed the update on Steam to give users time to decide if they want to upgrade now, or stick to Godot 3.5.x for the time being.

If you want to stay on Godot 3.5.x, please select the stable-3.5 "beta" branch in the Steam settings for the Godot Engine app. It has incidentally just be updated to the newly released Godot 3.5.2 maintenance update.

As of today, Godot 4.0 is on the default branch!

Note that the official demo projects are still in the process of being ported to Godot 4.0. We also stopped including them in the default Steam distribution, so instead of having your Project Manager filled with all existing official demos, you can choose the ones you're interested in from the Asset Library. At this time, you won't find any official demo in the Asset Library, so change the filter from "Official" to "Community" to find the many amazing demos and templates that users are publishing right now.

PS: If you had switched to the stable-4.0 branch to try it early, we recommend switching back to the default branch now that it's up to date.
We usually keep the latest "stable-x.y" branch one patch version behind "default" so that you can easily rollback an update if it causes issues. So when Godot 4.0.1 is released, we'll push it to "default", but not immediately to "stable-4.0". Then when 4.0.2 is released, it will be pushed to "default" and the previous 4.0.1 will be pushed to "stable-4.0", etc.

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.

We released Godot 3.5 in early August, and like any release, there are few rough edges to iron out which warrant making maintenance "patch" releases (3.5.x). Such maintenance releases focus on fixing bugs and not on integrating new features. This helps guarantee that the overall production readiness of the stable branch keeps increasing.

So this 3.5.1 release fixes a number of regressions that users reported after the release, as well as various other fixes to pre-existing bugs and usability improvements.

This is a safe and recommended update for all Godot 3.5.x users. It should have no major incidence on your projects, even complex ones in production, if you're already using 3.5-stable.

As usual though, if you need to go back to the previous 3.5 version (3.5-stable), you can use the stable-3.5 beta branch in the Steam settings for the application.

Read the release blog post for details on the changes.

The illustration picture is from Dome Keeper, an innovative roguelike survival miner with gorgeous artwork, developed by Bippinbits and published by Raw Fury. It was just released on Steam and the first players seem to love it, check it out!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

After 9 months of development, Godot 3.5 is out and it comes fully packed with features and quality of life improvements!

While most development focus is on our upcoming Godot 4.0 release, many contributors and users want a robust and mature 3.x branch to develop and publish their games today, so it's important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. Most of work was aimed at implementing missing features or fixing bugs which are critical for publishing 2D and 3D games with Godot 3.x, and at making the existing features more optimized and reliable.

Godot 3.5 is compatible with Godot 3.4.x projects and is a recommended upgrade for all 3.4.x users.

New features include:

• New Navigation Server with obstacle avoidance
  
• Physics interpolation in 3D
  
• Better tweening with SceneTreeTween
  
• Time singleton
  
• Label3D and TextMesh
  
• Access nodes by unique names
  
• New flow containers
  
• Asynchronous shader compilation + caching (ubershader)
  
• OccluderShapePolygon (3D)
  
• Android editor port and optimizations
  
• Material Overlay
  
• Other rendering changes
  
• Big improvements to VCS UI
  
• Hundreds of other improvements
  

[h2]Check the Release Notes on the Godot blog for an overview of changes![/h2]

If for some reason you do not want to upgrade, you can switch to the stable-3.4 beta branch to stay on Godot 3.4.5-stable.