“Another development snapshot already? Didn’t they just release one last Friday?”
Indeed, this is much sooner than usual. Even when taking into consideration how development snapshots become more frequent at their tail-end in preparation of feature freeze, less than a week means that exceptional circumstances were at play. Specifically: our previous development snapshot had multiple startup crash reports on macOS and failed to upload to the Google Play Store, which have both been rectified by GH-123439 and GH-123474 respectively.
Shockingly, that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to see in this blogpost. While this’ll be a lighter showcase than usual, we still have some new goodies we’re excited to showcase!
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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 Acceptable Losses, a command and management game set in WWI, where you lead your squads through a short, but brutal, 20 day campaign. You can buy the game or try the demo for free on Steam, and follow the developers on Bluesky and Discord.
Highlights
In case you missed them, see the 4.8 dev 1, 4.8 dev 2, 4.8 dev 3, 4.8 dev 4, and 4.8 dev 5 release notes for an overview of some key features which were already in those snapshots, and are therefore still available for testing in 4.8 dev 6.
Rendering: Add screen-space contact shadows for directional lights
The past few rendering highlights have been very convenient for us to showcase, as they’ve consistently had concrete examples and presentations that we can pull from in addition to the writeup itself. Screen-space contact shadows for directional lights are no exception, as Rudolph Bester ended up using Bend Studios’ approach in his implementation with GH-118045.
With these changes, a new option has been added to the environment resource and directional light node to enable screen space contact shadows (SSCS). It creates an R8 shadow texture for each directional light in the scene and blends them with existing shadow maps. This results in performant shadows that don’t compromise their visual quality.
| Disabled | Enabled |
|---|---|
 |  |
Editor: Clean and simplify 3D toolbar
Our third and final entry in Jayden Sipe’s trilogy of toolbar overhauls arrived at last with GH-121065. Much like the game embed and 2D toolbars before it, the 3D toolbar has been given a fresh coat of paint, emphasizing visual clarity and usability above all else.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
And more!
There are too many exciting changes to list them all here, but here’s a curated selection:
- GDScript: Improve performance for Syntax Highlighting (GH-123320).
- Input: Add
long_pressproperty to InputEventScreenTouch (GH-122865). - Input: Fix panning & touchpad scrolling on Linux & macOS (GH-111305).
- Platforms: Android: Minor bug fixes for the Android XR editor (GH-123474).
- Rendering: Metal: Fix crash on startup (GH-123439).
- Rendering: Vulkan: Fix swapped swappy_mode cases in swap chain resize (GH-123300).
- Thirdparty: SDL: Update to 3.4.16 (GH-120373).
- XR: Implement multi-layer projection camera (GH-116424).
Changelog
28 contributors submitted 56 fixes for this release. See our interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since 4.8 dev 5. You can also review all changes included in 4.8 compared to the previous 4.7 feature release.
This release is built from commit 8898c2b3d.
Downloads
Linux
macOS
Windows
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.
- OpenXR Spatial Container integration had a regression starting with GH-116424; investigation into a solution is ongoing.
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 in their free time, as well as a handful of part and 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 the Godot Foundation. There are also several alternative ways to donate which you may find more suitable.