Woah, two development snapshots in the same week? Indeed, we’re gonna be handling the transition to the beta stage a little differently this time around.

During the development pipeline of Godot 4.x, we developed a bit of a bad habit by starting the feature freeze AT the first beta release. While not inherently bad, this did lead to somewhat bloated blog posts that had to juggle both newly-added features and the more general feature roundup for the release as a whole. So while this format may work for some organizations, we’re trying something new by implementing the feature freeze preemptively. As of this moment: Godot 4.6 is in feature freeze, and dev 6 will be our final development snapshot.

A big benefit of this is the ability to isolate the big additions and fixes for the final new features that made it over the finish line in time. So while this will be a smaller roundup than usual, there’s still plenty of exciting additions we’re eager to showcase.

Please consider supporting the project financially, if you are able. Godot is maintained by the efforts of volunteers and a small team of paid contributors. Your donations go towards sponsoring their work and ensuring they can dedicate their undivided attention to the needs of the project.

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, the XR 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 cover illustration is from WAR RATS: The Rat em Up, a tactical shoot ‘em up, where you lead your fearless troops in the Great Rat War against the onslaught of the TechnoRat legion. You can get the game on Steam, and check out the developers on Twitter or Instagram!

Highlights

GDScript: Tracy profiler support

In the 4.6 dev 4 blog post, we had a section featuring dedicated profiler support. That section was written for more technical users that were already familiar with how dedicated profilers operated, so it focused on their immediate benefit of profiling the C++ code of the Godot Engine itself. In hindsight, we could’ve expanded it to be more readable for the average user, as this system had the potential to expand to profiling well beyond our system internals. It was ultimately considered superfluous, as no such integrations existed, and implementing them in a handful of weeks before feature freeze was extremely unlikely.

…You read the header, you know where this is going. Lukas Tenbrink, the original implementer of dedicated profiler support, collaborated with enetheru to bring this native support to GDScript (GH-113279)! While currently limited to tracy, this is a major first step in allowing these dedicated profilers to be a universal solution for debugging performance.

Documentation on how to utilize these native profilers yourself will soon be available here (currently in PR form).

Android: Storage Access Framework support

Godot apps on Android have this unfortunate hurdle of effectively requiring the MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. Without it, users were limited to files within the Documents/Download directories that the app itself created. Despite other scoped permissions being available for media files (READ_MEDIA_IMAGES, READ_MEDIA_AUDIO, and READ_MEDIA_VIDEO), non-media files (.txt, .json, etc) still required the special MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. While workarounds did exist, the best solution would be one that sidesteps the issue entirely.

syntaxerror247 has brought a solution in the form of implementing full Storage Access Framework (SAF) support (GH-112215). With the addition of SAF, users are now free to open and save files from any directory with the system file picker. Because the system itself handles the logic for permissions, the app no longer needs to concern itself with requesting explicit permissions from the end-user.

And more!

There are too many exciting changes to list them all here, but here’s a curated selection:

  • Animation: Add BoneTwistDisperser3D to propagate IK target’s twist (GH-113284).
  • Animation: Add solo/hide/lock/delete buttons to node groups in bezier track editor (GH-110866).
  • Audio: AudioServer to have function to access microphone buffer directly (GH-113288).
  • Core: Add Apple Instruments support (GH-113342).
  • Core: Reuse/optimize common OperatorEvaluator*::evaluate logic (GH-113132).
  • GDScript: Prevent shallow scripts from leaking into the ResourceCache (GH-109345).
  • GUI: Add scroll hints to ScrollContainer and Tree (GH-112491).
  • GUI: Make EditorFileDialog inherit FileDialog (GH-111212).
  • Rendering: Add white, contrast, and future HDR support to the AgX tonemapper (GH-106940).
  • Rendering: Implement point size emulation in the forward shader for D3D12 (GH-112191).
  • Rendering: Rewrite Radiance and Reflection probes to use Octahedral maps (GH-107902).
  • Rendering: Use re-spirv in the Vulkan driver to optimize shaders (GH-111452).

Changelog

67 contributors submitted 140 fixes for this release. See our interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since 4.6-dev5. You can also review all changes included in 4.6 compared to the previous 4.5 feature release.

This release is built from commit dec5a373d.

Downloads

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Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.

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

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 case of corruption or data loss.

Known issues

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

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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.

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