Godot 4.7 Release

We’ll keep going with this field imagery. Imagine you’re in a field. In the far distance, you see a lone developer, hunched over their laptop. You intuitively yell through the tall grass, “VEC2 V4 = UV;”!! The developer victoriously pumps their hand in the air, but in your heart you know you’ll need to see the results for yourself. You tread through the field, and at last, gasping for air, you look over the lone developer’s shoulder to witness your creation.

With inline text shader previews, the treacherous journey is over.

Right as you type vec2 v4 = UV;, you can now preview Godot text shaders within the editor in real-time. Back in the day, you would have needed to compile a shader and view it separately in the workspace. But thanks to the long-awaited quality-of-life addition to the text shader editor, you will actually be able to preview the shader and what it will do, in the moment, as you’re working on the shader from within the editor!

Developing on Android and XR has been possible for a while, and with the stable release of the Godot Android Build Environment (GABE), developers can now export and publish their games as well!

GABE is a companion app to the Godot Android editor that developers can download for Gradle export support.

Godot 4.7 sees some QOL improvements to better integrate and leverage GABE on Android devices.

When creating geometry with CSG nodes, they inherit the smooth/sharp faces from the original mesh data. This is not always suitable, as it can lead to curves being made of sharp faces depending on how they were constructed.

Enabling the new Autosmooth property on a root CSG node will automatically assign smooth or sharp faces according to the Smoothing Angle property (which defaults to 50 degrees). Higher values will smooth faces more aggressively.

FILL_CONIC was newly added to GradientTexture2D, enabling the use of CSS-style effects. This is particularly useful in custom 2D shaders to simulate surfaces with realistic, 3D-like shading.

Some features in Godot, such as choosing a new class for a Resource property or selecting a language, spawn tall dialogs with hundreds of options to choose from. While incremental search exists (typing some letters to highlight the first match), it’s difficult to discover and is not usable on a touchscreen.

PopupMenu now supports optionally showing a search dialog at the top, making this functionality much easier to discover. On top of that, this also sidesteps the limitation on incremental search delay: you can take as much time as you want to type the desired search query.

While RichTextLabel offered a way to adjust font and image sizes, you still needed to manually set the size of images to match the text.

Thanks to this new feature, you can now resize images relative to the font size automatically. For example, [font_size=40]Example: [img height=1em]example.png[/img][/font_size] will render the image example.png at a size that matches the parent font size.

The focused element of a user interface can move in unexpected ways. While we introduced screen reader support in 4.5, it lacked the ability to provide context information in some cases. While a line input could be set to describe a “name” field, it doesn’t help if you don’t know what it is the name of.

By introducing landmark navigation, the screen reader can give some context information once you enter the perimeter of a landmark, such as telling the screen reader user that the focus is currently in the Inspector, on the name field.

For 3D games with a retro art style, or when you want to maximize crispness when using a low-resolution scale for performance reasons, you can now use nearest-neighbor filtering for 3D rendering. Like the existing 3D resolution scale options, this does not affect 2D rendering. Performance is roughly identical to bilinear filtering.

AtlasTexture allows drawing a specific region of a texture in 2D. This can improve performance on low-end devices by reducing texture changes, but also makes it easier to organize assets by having fewer files lying around in the project directory. However, AtlasTexture requires specific support in each node that wishes to make use of it.

Support for AtlasTexture is now available in TextureRect, which can draw part of an AtlasTexture as a repeating texture for use in nine-patch texturing.

Right-click a category or group of properties in the Inspector to quickly copy and paste their values.

The GridMap node uses a MeshLibrary resource to source the tiles that can be placed. Previously, editing a MeshLibrary resource had to be done entirely in the Inspector, which made it tedious to work with.

There is now a dedicated MeshLibrary editor, similar to the TileSet editor in 2D. This greatly streamlines the process of adding and editing tiles for use in a GridMap node.

When opening the “Create” dialog for a node or resource in 4.7, you’ll be able to filter the elements shown in the tree.

Want to instantiate something from your code? No problem: make sure “Show Custom” is the only checkbox selected in the new option menu, just below the “Favorite” button.

When working with a lot of open scripts, it can be challenging to find the script you’re currently working on in the list of scripts. To make this easier, you can now double-click the name of the current script at the top of the script editor to reveal the script in the list.

The 3D camera controllers for the editor and embedded game are now unified.

This adds support for several features in the 3D camera override when using game embedding:

• Configurable shortcuts for view manipulation (as set in the editor settings).
• Use of the navigation scheme configured in the editor settings.
• Camera snapping when orbiting (hold Alt and drag the middle mouse button).
• Orbit, panning, and freelook inertia, if enabled in the editor settings.

We made the built-in documentation layout look more like the online documentation. It is now cleaner and more readable. Expect to see improved readability for docs in-engine.

Use the new Tween.tween_await() method to pause a tween until a specific signal is emitted. This can be especially helpful when designing dialogue and cutscenes.

Operating systems handle gamepad input differently from keyboard and mouse input, as gamepad input is sent even when the window is unfocused. While this can be beneficial in some situations, it can lead to unintended inputs, potentially leading to accidentally exiting a game in the worst case.

By enabling the Input Devices > Joypads > Ignore Joypad on Unfocused Application project setting, you can now make your project ignore gamepad input unless the window is focused. This setting is disabled by default to preserve existing behavior.

Like gamepad inputs, keyboard and mouse inputs now use a device identifier. This can be used to distinguish keyboard/mouse inputs from other inputs by checking the InputEvent’s device property. Keyboard inputs always have their device ID set to InputEvent.DEVICE_ID_KEYBOARD, while mouse inputs have it set to InputEvent.DEVICE_ID_MOUSE.

While this change does not add support for differentiating between multiple keyboards or mice connected to the same system, it lays a foundation that makes this possible to implement in the future.

We have switched to the battle-tested SDL3 library for controller support on iOS, as previously done on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This ensures more controllers have the right default mappings.

Make the particle system of your dreams! You can now create particles that scale and rotate more than ever. It’s an easy way to add more oompf to your animations.

One of the main usability issues of the Android Editor is script editing. While many improvements in this area are currently in progress, we’ve addressed one big issue: the fact that the on-screen keyboard takes up a large portion of the available screen space on mobile, making it difficult to work with code.

We’ve enabled changing the orientation for the Script editor. When it’s in expanded mode, you can now rotate your device to switch between portrait and landscape orientation.

Many developers prefer coding in portrait mode, as it provides more vertical space and allows more lines to be visible at once. This makes navigating, reading, and writing scripts much more comfortable on mobile.

The Android team continues their work to facilitate integration and access of Android APIs in GDScript through the JavaClassWrapper and the AndroidRuntime plugin.

In Godot 4.7, these capabilities have been expanded by adding support for implementing and overriding Java interfaces in GDScript.