Two weeks ago we wrapped up the development of Godot 4.1, bringing more polish and stability to the Godot 4 series, and just two days ago we shipped its first maintenance release, addressing some of the more urgent issues that slipped in. In preparation for both of these releases we temporarily put aside many improvements to ensure stability and to avoid any last minute regressions.

Today, we are ready to share these improvements with you with 4.2 dev 1 being available for public testing (you can read about the most notable changes below). This first development snapshot marks the proper start of the new development cycle, which means in the coming weeks we will be quickly merging many changes as contributors implement new features and fix long-standing bugs. You should expect a dev snapshot every 1 or 2 weeks, depending on how stable the development branch is after any given series of merges.

Please note that dev 1 includes many changes that just barely missed being included in 4.1, so expect it to be a little bit more feature packed than normal dev builds.

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 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 for this article is from Terrain3D — an editor plugin for 3D terrain sculpting and painting, created by Roope Palmroos (Outobugi Games) and Cory Petkovsek (Tokisan Games). This is an essential tool for any open world 3D game, and it’s made from the ground up for Godot 4. The project is in alpha, but stable enough for public testing — so download it now from GitHub! Also follow Roope (Twitter, YouTube) and Cory (Twitter, YouTube) on social for more updates on their ongoing projects, built with Terrain3D.

What’s new

83 contributors submitted over 200 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. Some of the changes present in this release are also available in Godot 4.1.1.

Below are the most notable changes compared to 4.1.1-stable:

  • 2D: Streamline creating tile atlas sources (GH-79285).
  • 3D: Wrap mouse for blender-style transforms (GH-59467).
  • 3D: Fix VoxelGI saving VoxelGIData as a built-in file, despite being prompted to save it to an external file (GH-78772).
  • Animation: Add animation playback preview to scene import settings (GH-76367).
  • Animation: Add TileSetAtlasSource::TileAnimationMode options and allow to shuffle tile animations (GH-77257).
  • Animation: Fix Animation::subtract_variant for affine transforms (GH-79279).
  • Audio: Implement loading OGG files from buffer and file path (GH-78084).
  • Buildsystem: Allow unbundling OpenXR (for Linux distros) (GH-73443).
  • C#: Add PropertyHint.Enum support to Array<StringName> (GH-78264).
  • C#: Add a Roslyn analyzer for global classes (GH-79007).
  • C#: Add missing useModelFront parameter to GodotSharp Basis and Transform (GH-79082).
  • Core: Fix Image.convert() overwriting custom mipmaps (GH-74238).
  • Core: Add command-line option to run a MainLoop by its global class name (GH-78045).
  • Core: Add Image::load_svg_from_(buffer|string) (GH-78248).
  • Core: Unify and streamline connecting to Resource changes (GH-78993).
    • This change makes obsolete existing resource_changed methods on some classes. You need to convert your code to use signals instead.
  • Core: Fix range error for Array.slice (GH-79103).
  • Documentation: Remove version attribute from XML header (GH-79092).
  • Documentation: Add a warning about C# differences to the class reference (GH-79206).
  • Editor: Improve CodeEdit’s toggle comments behavior (GH-44557).
  • Editor: Add _get_unsaved_status() method to EditorPlugin (GH-67503).
  • Editor: Allow to pick which Resources will be made unique (GH-77855).
  • Editor: Change default Save Script shortcut (GH-79337).
  • Export: Android: Add options to show icon in Android TV and run app as Android launcher (GH-78164).
  • Export: Android: Re-architect how Android plugins are packaged and handled at export time (GH-78958).
  • Export: iOS: Implement one-click deploy (GH-70662).
  • Export: iOS: Add export_project_only flag (GH-78641).
  • GDScript: Make @onready variables created from dropping nodes include custom types (GH-79198).
  • GDScript: Solve _populate_class_members() cyclic dependency problem (GH-79205).
  • GDScript: Properly track extents of constants (GH-79301).
  • GUI: Add a [pulse] built-in effect to RichTextLabel (GH-77117).
  • GUI: Add loop property and get_stream_length method to VideoStreamPlayer (GH-77857, GH-77858).
  • GUI: Use S, V in hue bar of ColorPicker (GH-78100).
  • GUI: Add pop_all, push_context and pop_context methods to RichTextLabel (GH-79011).
  • GUI: Fix root_node_layout_direction project setting being incorrectly exposed as a range (GH-79611).
  • Import: Fix reimporting files with non lowercase name extension (GH-78567).
  • Import: Add support for GLTF extension KHR_materials_emissive_strength (GH-78621, GH-79421).
  • Import: Allow change import type without restarting editor (GH-78890).
  • Input: Prevent double input events on gamepad when running through steam input (GH-76045).
  • Input: Android: Set echo property for the physical keyboard events (GH-79089).
  • Multiplayer: Use get/set_indexed in MultiplayerSynchronizer (GH-79479).
    • This change allows synchronizing (sub-)resource properties, transform components, etc. without having to synchronize the entire object.
  • Navigation: Add NavigationRegion function to change navigation map (GH-77191).
  • Navigation: Mark NavigationServer3D.region_bake_navigation_mesh as deprecated (GH-79137).
  • Navigation: Change 2D navigation ProjectSettings from integers to floats (GH-79483).
  • Particles: Add finished signal to CPUParticles and GPUParticles (GH-76853, GH-76859).
  • Physics: Add hit_back_faces property to RayCast3D (GH-79330).
  • Porting: Implement native file selection dialog support (GH-47499, GH-79574).
    • This is only implemented for macOS and Windows so far. This feature is especially important for sandboxed apps on macOS.
  • Porting: Android: Refactor Godot Android architecture (GH-76821).
  • Porting: macOS: Fix uncapped frame rate for windows in the non-active workspaces (GH-79572).
  • Rendering: Draw frustum splices on top of direction shadow atlas for debug purposes (GH-77085).
  • Rendering: Split raster barrier into vertex and fragment barrier (GH-77420).
    • This change currently breaks compatibility by modifying some of the values for the BarrierMask enumeration. If you don’t rely on the values of BarrierMask, no modifications are necessary.
  • Rendering: Replace sampler arrays with constant sampler elements (GH-77740).
  • Rendering: Use Gaussian approximation for backbuffer mipmaps in GL Compatibility renderer (GH-78168).
  • Shaders: Add DEPTH to the visual shader output (for spatial mode) (GH-73691).
  • Shaders: Allow more hint types for uniform arrays (GH-79100).
  • Shaders: Add autocomplete for filter/repeat hints on uniform arrays (GH-79402).
  • Thirdparty: Fix ZIPReader failing to open empty zip files (GH-73310).
  • Thirdparty: FreeType 2.13.1, HarfBuzz 8.0.0, ICU4C 73.2, openxr 1.0.28.
  • XR: Fix issue with accessing hand tracking without timing info (GH-78817).

This release is built from commit 0c2144da9 (see README).

Downloads

The downloads for this pre-release build can be found in our GitHub repository:

Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.

.NET 6 build (marked as mono) includes support for C#, as well as GDScript and GDExtension.

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 4.2 dev 1).

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.