This was an exciting year for Godot! Our contributors managed to deliver massive, feature-packed releases 3 times over our previous norm. We can’t wait to see and share what the international community of passionate game and game engine developers can create for you in the year 2024. Actually, they have already started their work on the upcoming Godot 4.3 release.

And it’s holiday season, so we cannot leave you without a small gift as we wrap up the production and plan our leisure time. Please, enjoy the first dev snapshot of Godot 4.3, which includes quite a few noteworthy improvements for you to play with. It also contains a handful of fixes, including pretty much everything published last week in Godot 4.2.1.

Here are the highlights of this build, and you can also go ahead and read a more complete list of changes below:

  • Major refactoring of the rendering system (GH-83452), which paves the way to several big improvements coming soon (here’s one of them). In the meantime, please test anything and everything related to rendering. Even though this change has been rigorously evaluated by a multitude of experienced contributors, we, as always, rely on our community to make absolutely sure things are as smooth and stable as they seem.

  • The new Direct3D 12 rendering driver is here for all your Microsoft-adjacent cross-platform needs (GH-70315). Being based on proprietary technology, D3D12 support comes as an optional feature keeping the open source spirit of the engine intact. Make sure to check the updated documentation for compiling Godot with D3D12 enabled (there is also an update regarding cross-compilation getting ready to be merged).

  • Multiple controllers can now contribute to input actions (GH-84943), which expands upon previous fixes to multiple devices triggering input at the same time.

  • Profiler improvements for scripting (GH-75623) and rendering (GH-85811).

  • Node groups can now be configured project-wide (GH-60965), with scenes correctly updating when you make the changes.

  • Freed objects are now treated differently from null in comparison operators (GH-73896), which ensures consistency for programmers when managing instances and memory.

  • Loading of scenes with corrupted or missing dependencies will no longer be aborted (GH-85159), allowing you to use and fix such scenes without external tools.

  • And finally, an infamous bug causing areas to lose signal connections when pausing/unpausing the game has been fixed (GH-81809).

Keep in mind that while we try to make sure each dev snapshot is stable enough for general testing, this is by definition a pre-release piece of software. Be sure to make frequent backups, or use a version control system such as Git, to preserve your projects in a case of corruption or data loss.

Jump to the Downloads section, and give it a spin right now, or continue reading to learn more about improvements in this release. You can also try the Web editor or the Android editor for this release. If you are interested in the latter, please request to join our testing group to get access to pre-release builds.

The illustration picture comes from Yeetus — an action roguelike game made by YarnCat Games, where the ground underneath your feet is your only weapon against waves and waves of enemies. The game is made with Godot 4, and you can get it right now on Steam. Make sure to follow YarnCat Games on social networks (Twitter, TikTok) to keep in touch and be the first to learn about their next project!

What’s new

101 contributors submitted 252 improvements for this release. You can review the complete list of changes with our interactive changelog, which contains links to relevant commits and PRs for this and every previous release. Below are the most notable changes compared to 4.2.1-stable:

This release is built from commit 9d1cbab1c.

Downloads

Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.

.NET build (marked as mono) includes support for C#, as well as GDScript and GDExtension.

  • .NET build requires .NET SDK 6.0, 7.0, or 8.0 installed in a standard location.
  • To export to Android, .NET 7.0 or later is required. To export to iOS, .NET 8.0 is required. Make sure to set the target framework in the .csproj file.
While engine maintainers try their best to ensure that each preview snapshot and release candidate is stable, this is by definition a pre-release piece of software. Be sure to make frequent backups, or use a version control system such as Git, to preserve your projects in a case of corruption or data loss.

Known issues

There are currently no known issues introduced by this release.

With every release we accept that there are going to be various issues, which have already been reported but haven’t been fixed yet. See the GitHub issue tracker for a complete list of known bugs.

Bug reports

As a tester, we encourage you to open bug reports if you experience issues with this release. Please check the existing issues on GitHub first, using the search function with relevant keywords, to ensure that the bug you experience is not already known.

In particular, any change that would cause a regression in your projects is very important to report (e.g. if something that worked fine in previous 4.x releases, but no longer works in this snapshot).

Support

Godot is a non-profit, open source game engine developed by hundreds of contributors on their free time, as well as a handful of part or full-time developers hired thanks to generous donations from the Godot community. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed their time or their financial support to the project!

If you’d like to support the project financially and help us secure our future hires, you can do so using the Godot Development Fund platform managed by Godot Foundation. There are also several alternative ways to donate which you may find more suitable.

Source: Godot Engine Official