Dev Planet
Dev snapshot: Godot 4.4 beta 3
Woah, another beta build already? You’re not imagining things, it’s only been a week since our last release. The team is fully in the swing of getting release-blockers merged, so we’re able to expedite output. What’s more, our community has been on the ball with submitting regression reports; thanks to everyone who’s involved themselves!
While progress has been at a rate we’re all excited about, it’s not over yet! We’ll likely do one more beta release the following week, but after that we hope to be gearing up for release candidates. If you haven’t already, we encourage users who haven’t engaged with the beta releases to do so and help us catch the last few stragglers.
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 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 Ballionaire, a roguelike pachinko simulator where the laws of physics bend to your will, developed by newobject and published by Raw Fury! You can buy the game on Steam, and follow the developer on BlueSky and itch.io.
Highlights
For an overview of what’s new overall in Godot 4.4, have a look at the highlights for 4.4 beta 1, which cover a lot of the changes. This blog post only covers the changes between beta 2 and beta 3. This section covers the most relevant changes made since the beta 2 snapshot, which are largely regression fixes.
UID upgrade tool
The introduction of .uid
files remains one of the biggest changes to the 4.4 release cycle, so much so that we gave it a dedicated article. However, it hasn’t been the most straightforward system, particularly for those that are attempting to upgrade their projects from 4.3. In order to address this, Malcolm Anderson has put together a UID upgrade tool to automate this process (GH-103071).
Porting fixes to Embedded/Floating Window mode
The Embedded/Floating game window option added in 4.4 is proving to be quite popular, but also exposes all kinds of quirks on various systems with how they deal with windows. Hilderin did impressive work to track and fix these issues, with pull requests such as GH-102104, GH-102238, GH-102251, GH-102311, GH-102312, GH-102470, and more! The experience should be much better already in beta 3.
Lightmap baking improvements
Clay John changed the logic for baking direct lighting in LightmapGI to spread it over multiple frames, avoiding a spike of computation that can lead the OS to trigger TDR, resulting in a crash of the GPU context (GH-102257). With some further fixes like GH-102424, GH-102497, and GH-102477, lightmap baking got a nice upgrade in this snapshot.
And more!
- Animation: Fix incomplete FPS spinbox display in sprite frames editor (GH-101798).
- Audio: Web: Fix audio issues with samples and GodotPositionReportingProcessor (GH-102163).
- Core: Add explicit error messages to Multimesh functions (GH-101109).
- Core: Fix
Basis::get_euler
incorrectly simplifying rotations in some cases (GH-102144). - Core: Fix
is_valid_float
,Variant
parser,Expression
parser, script highlighter, andTextServer
not handing capital E in scientific notation (GH-102396). - Editor: Fix resource details will unexpectedly expand (GH-101817).
- Editor: Improve UID file creation condition (GH-102489).
- Editor: Optimize classnames enumeration (GH-101489).
- Editor: Revert “EditorResourcePicker: Replace options to load file with button for QuickOpenDialog” (GH-102196).
- Editor: Use
FlowContainer
forProfiler
andVisual Profiler
bars (GH-102024). - Export: Disable Metal and Vulkan renderers in simulator builds. Remove simulator support from editor/exporter (GH-102179).
- GDExtension: Fix memory leak when
ClassDB::bind_method_custom()
fails (GH-102131). - GDScript: Fix uppercase B and X parsing in the integer literals (GH-102400).
- GUI: Fix TextEdit mouse selection and scroll cancel (GH-91778).
- GUI: Fix TextEdit visible line count when setting text (GH-102296).
- GUI: Introduce
Viewport
functions for keeping the mouse over state consistent (GH-99890). - GUI: Prevent tooltip from showing when hovering past the end of script line (GH-100913).
- Network: Fix WebSocket wslay multi-frame message parsing (again) (GH-102128).
- Porting: FreeDesktop portal: Check for
FileChooser
andSettings
interface availability instead of assuming it’s always available (GH-101812). - Porting: Implement
get_length()
for pipes (GH-102365). - Rendering: 2D: Fix clip children and rendering artefacts (GH-102161).
- Rendering: Add loop annotations to ubershaders to prevent loop unrolling (GH-102480).
- Rendering: Fix shadow peter-panning with default spotlight (GH-101952).
- Rendering: Fully enable HDR2D when the setting is changed (GH-102177).
- Rendering: Mark pipeline compilation of ubershaders as high priority (GH-102125).
- Rendering: Metal: Enable GPU buffer address support (GH-101602).
- Rendering: Use a smaller epsilon for omni and spot attenuation cutoff (GH-102272).
- Shaders: Fix
source_color
default value (GH-101642). - Thirdparty: Harmonize patches to document downstream changes (GH-102242).
Changelog
51 contributors submitted 116 improvements for this release. See our interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since the 4.4-beta2 snapshot. You can also review all changes included in 4.4 compared to the previous 4.3 feature release.
This release is built from commit 06acfccf89
.
Downloads
Godot is downloading…
Godot exists thanks to donations from people like you. Help us continue our work:
Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.
.NET build (marked as mono
) includes support for C#, as well as GDScript and GDExtension.
- .NET 8.0 or newer is required for this build, changing the minimal supported version from .NET 6 to 8.
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
During the beta stage, we focus on solving both regressions (i.e. something that worked in a previous release is now broken) and significant new bugs introduced by new features. You can have a look at our current list of regressions and significant issues which we aim to address before releasing 4.4. This list is dynamic and will be updated if we discover new showstopping issues after more users start testing the beta snapshots.
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.
-
Baking a Lightmap3D is more prone to crash after we added support for transparency. The issue is tracked in GH-101391.
-
Changes to scenes are not reflected in APK exports after the initial export in the Android editor. The issue is tracked in GH-101007.
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 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.
jMonkeyEngine: jMonkeyEngine 3.8.0-alpha3
Libre Arts: Weekly recap — 2 February 2025
Castle Game Engine: January News – Android uninstall, list devices, fix for Android 15; query texture RGBA color from Pascal; IFC and web progress; set default platform; fix for bundled FPC + VS Code
Dev snapshot: Godot 4.4 beta 2
We’ve been keeping busy these past two weeks squashing the bugs that cropped up in 4.4 beta 1. Despite how much the previous snapshot added, it bears repeating that we have entered the 4.4 feature freeze, so our energy has been focused on addressing any new regressions or the aforementioned bugs. We’re still aiming for a release sometime next month, but that all depends on how effectively new bugs get reported during this period. Users are strongly encouraged to test these beta releases so this process can be as smooth and expedient as possible!
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 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 The Roottrees are Dead, a detective game where you piece together a family tree’s billion-dollar paper trail through the power of a dial-up modem! You can buy the game on Steam, and follow the developer on BlueSky.
Highlights
For an overview of what’s new overall in Godot 4.4, have a look at the highlights for 4.4 beta 1, which cover a lot of the changes. This blog post only covers the changes between beta 1 and beta 2. This section covers the most relevant changes made since the beta 1 snapshot, which are largely regression fixes:
- 2D: Add property guards to shape 2D’s (GH-101747).
- 3D: Add flag to enable use of accurate path tangents for polygon rotation in
CSGPolygon3D
(GH-94479). - Android: Fix
create_instance
in GodotApp so non-editor apps can restart (GH-101050). - Animation: Add validation for rotation axis to SpringBoneSimulator3D (GH-101571).
- Animation: Clarify
SpringBoneSimulator3D
’s gravity units and improve documentation (GH-101652). - Animation: Fix glitch in
SpringBoneSimulator3D
by storing the previous frame’s rotation instead of using no rotation when the axis is flipped (GH-101651). - Animation: Remove dead variable
end_bone_tip_radius
fromSpringBoneSimulator3D
(GH-101861). - Audio: Fix default
AudioBusLayout
not loading correctly if path is set in Project Settings (GH-100371). - Core: Fix “res://” being replaced by resource packs in the editor and on Android (GH-90425).
- Editor: Add editor setting to globally override project game mode settings (GH-101283).
- Editor: Don’t duplicate .uid files (GH-101683).
- Editor: Fix center viewport not working horizontally (GH-93792).
- Editor: Fix crashes when pressing enter on project manager screen (GH-101572).
- Editor: Fix Embedded Game Size (GH-101807).
- Editor: Fix Embedded Game Window with user arguments (GH-101739).
- Editor: Fix flickering in embedded game when paused (GH-102006).
- GDScript: Fix GDScript editor crash on invalid
tween_property
arguments (GH-101632). - Input: Added shortcut for Lookup Symbol action (GH-101565).
- Input: Delegate handling
mouse_mode
to theDisplayServer
(GH-101924). - Navigation: Make nodes handle their respective navigation source geometry (GH-100882).
- Network: Fix peer stuck in CLOSING state (GH-101760).
- Physics: Add debug colours and fills to CollisionPolygon3D (GH-101810).
- Physics: Refactor post-step operations in Jolt module to be done as needed (GH-101815).
- Rendering: Bake UV2 emission using half float in the compatibility backend (GH-101730).
- Rendering: Ensure Voxelizer SDF generation uses the correct cell level (GH-101631).
- Shaders: Fix space transformations in WorldPositionFromDepth visual shader node generation (GH-100350).
- Windows: Fix left/right Shift key regression (GH-101763).
Changelog
76 contributors submitted 142 improvements for this release. See our interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since the 4.4-beta1 snapshot. You can also review all changes included in 4.4 compared to the previous 4.3 feature release.
This release is built from commit a013481b09
.
Downloads
Godot is downloading…
Godot exists thanks to donations from people like you. Help us continue our work:
Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.
.NET build (marked as mono
) includes support for C#, as well as GDScript and GDExtension.
- .NET 8.0 or newer is required for this build, changing the minimal supported version from .NET 6 to 8.
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
During the beta stage, we focus on solving both regressions (i.e. something that worked in a previous release is now broken) and significant new bugs introduced by new features. You can have a look at our current list of regressions and significant issues which we aim to address before releasing 4.4. This list is dynamic and will be updated if we discover new showstopping issues after more users start testing the beta snapshots.
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.
-
Baking a Lightmap3D is more prone to crash after we added support for transparency. The issue is tracked in GH-101391.
-
Changes to scenes are not reflected in APK exports after the initial export in the Android editor. The issue is tracked in GH-101007.
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 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.
2024 Cherry-picks
And with that, the 2024 season comes to an end. What a year it has been, with the number of Godot submissions in game jams rising to new heights, more people working for the Godot Foundation than ever before, and most industry award shows featuring one if not more games made with Godot.
A busy year inside the project as well. Too much to compile into a single article, unless you want to read pages of meeting notes and technical documentation. So instead, we chose to celebrate the past by looking back at one cherry-pick per month, something you might have missed during the scuffle but is worth learning about even now.
This could be an event the team attended, a major project milestone being reached, or a fun moment online the Godot community gathered around. Likewise, we looked at the release dates of notable Godot games on Steam and decided to introduce you to some favorites alongside our own organizational news. The separate tech highlight section might even introduce you to a feature or two you missed out on so far.
But before we get started, let us sneak in an announcement: this blog post is part of our newsletter project, premiering this January. Subscribe to “The Nodeletter” to get a regular digest of Godot Engine news directly in your email inbox!
Tech Highlights
To be frank: there is no good way to summarize the work of hundreds of contributors across the span of an entire year without leaving out something important. The closest we can feasibly get are the Godot 4.3 release page, and the newly published Godot 4.4 beta 1 release notes.
For the purpose of this retrospective, we approached the engine maintainers directly, asking them to point us at one particularly compelling change they witnessed in their area of expertise. How many of these have you not heard about yet?
General
- 2D: 2D parallax
- 3D: 3D physics interpolation
- Core: Typed dictionaries
- Editor: Project Manager refresh, Android Editor: export support
- Documentation: Comment section added
Platforms
- Android: Native file picker support
- Web: Single-threaded exports and audio samples
- Linux: Wayland support
- macOS/iOS: Metal renderer
- Windows: Direct3D 12
Systems
- Animation: Feature migration from Godot 4.0 to 4.3
- Audio: Interactive music
- Import: New ufbx importer
- Navigation: Chunk & obstacle baking
- Physics: Jolt merged
- Rendering: Ubershaders
- VFX: Visual Shader overhaul
- XR: Godot Editor now available on the Meta Horizon Store
Godot Engine News
January
Nostalgia became the theme of January, as we compiled a small game showcase leading up to Godot’s 10-year-anniversary (counting from the moment the engine was first open sourced). For every year from 2014 to 2024 we shared two gems found on Steam and itch.io with the community, celebrating an ever growing list of Godot releases since the beginnings of the project.
Have a look at that monumental commit all those years ago!

Desktop pets have risen to new popularity in 2024. KinitoPET combines this trend with the evergreen horror genre to bring you a unique experience about virtual assistants.
February
As part of our social media expansion, we also created an official Godot Engine account on the streaming platform Twitch.
Using it to check on Godot game development streamers resulted in this funny compilation — both the content creators and their viewers expressed happiness that the communities they had built were being recognized by us.
Logically, the next step was to hand over the reins of the channel to some of these talented developers directly. You can find the takeover recordings on our YouTube.

Another twist on “gaming directly on a desktop” came in the form of the action roguelike Windowkill. The twin-stick shooter requires you to keep track of and fight the ever-closing game windows while evading enemies.
March
In March, the Godot Foundation team assembled in San Francisco to meet community members at our biggest event booth yet, in the expo hall of the annual Game Developer Conference (GDC). We shared the space with our sponsor W4 Games and an amazing lineup of Godot-powered games that we had the pleasure of inviting.
We had a great time, both on the event grounds and at our own gatherings, and made sure to recount our full experience in a retrospective blog post — see you this year?

Backpack Battles decided to make inventory management the main game mechanic. The PvP auto-battler with a medieval fantasy theme has quickly gained popularity with content creators!
April
Towards the end of 2023 we announced a collaboration with Google and The Forge to improve the performance of our Vulkan mobile backend. The work concluded in April, with the matching PR being split into the 4.3 and 4.4 releases.
A few highlights:
- Usage of Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) buffers when available
- Add Android Thermal API support
- Replace large push constants with dynamic uniform buffers
- Optimize descriptor sets and descriptor set batching
- Optimize swapchain operations
- Integrate Swappy frame pacing from the Google AGDK
Read more about the changes in our collaboration update.

Build your own settlements in Of Life and Land and experience different maps, scenarios, and rich simulations. Strategize with animals and nature in mind!
May
Did you know that we still update Godot 3? Not everyone upgraded their projects when the big codebase refresh happened last year, so by offering two versions alongside each other we aim to accommodate these existing games as well as the lower-end systems used by some developers.
The feature freeze for 3.6 happened in May, leading up to the most recent release in September.
Look at these shiny highlights:
- 2D physics interpolation
- 2D hierarchical culling
- Mesh merging
- Discrete level of detail (LOD)
- ORM materials
- Text to speech

This game about cooking eggs in a cold climate found great reception on the internet. There is just something about the frustratingly fun mechanics of Arctic Eggs that captured quite an audience — who are we to judge your taste?
June
Our annual community poll rolled around in June. We want to know who our users are, so we can learn about common needs and offer the best support possible.
This year’s poll had more responses than ever before, once again proving the incredible growth the Godot community is experiencing.

Nominated for a plethora of awards, the visual novel Until Then tells the emotional story of the highschooler Mark in polished pixel art. Build relationships, play minigames, use social media, and most importantly: solve the mystery at hand.
July
The Godot robot plushies took the internet by storm. In a collaboration with Makeship, we finally proved our infamous logo’s worth. Toothy grin and googly eyes translated adorably into the 3D medium. By the end of the campaign, almost 4,000 cuddly coding companions were headed towards new homes.
Aside from the profits being funneled into the Godot Development Fund and thereby opening an additional path to supporting the project financially, the plush also became a beloved community icon. Fanart was made, models of the robot were shared, and the character was granted countless cameos in games made with the engine.
While the plush is currently sold out, we are working on bringing it back soon!

This tactical roguelite invites you to go on runs in the Forgotten Mines. Turn-based mechanics and an RPG flavor round off the experience.
August
Instead of our usual release blogposts, we tried something new for Godot 4.3: a fully fledged release page detailing all the juicy features awaiting you.
Highlights of the biggest release yet:
- Interactive music
- 2D physics interpolation
- TileMapLayer nodes
- Overhauled visual shader editor
- Multi-threading improvements
- Single-threaded web exports
All in all, 3,520 commits from 521 contributors came together in this shared effort!

More inventory management mechanics come to you in the form of Megaloot, a roguelite allowing for diverse and powerful builds each run. Looting strategically is key.
September
As an open-source community, the Godot project thrives in matters of community maintained extensions. To ensure that valuable knowledge does not get lost once a creator decides to step down, we opened a new GitHub organization called Godot SDK Integrations to host such projects.
Read more in our detailed blogpost on the topic.

Survive monster hordes in this bullet hell roguelite set in the underworld. Halls of Torment is also available on Steam Deck and Android for gaming on the go!
October
We listened to the feedback of last year’s GodotCon attendees and did the unthinkable: doubling the ticket amount once more, allowing 600 people onto the premises.
On top of that, we introduced a game showcase and activities to the event schedule. Increasing our scope like so, we hoped to invite a wider variety of visitors to enjoy mingling with other community members and facilitate networking.
Read the full GodotCon 2024 review to reminisce together with us or (re-)watch the talks on YouTube.

Atmospheric psychological horror awaits you in the catacombs of Psychopomp. Solve the secrets of these new levels or mod your own.
November
Watch this year’s Godot Engine showreel and join us in awe of the variety of projects being created by this community. Every year our expectations are exceeded all over again!
Submissions are handled via our own showreel page and always announced on our blog, so keep a close eye on those if you are interested in pitching your own game for the next one.

The second installment of this railroad construction game is made in Godot. Enjoy co-op gaming and procedurally generated worlds in Unrailed 2.
December
The Godot Engine GitHub repository is not only the most popular one in the game development category and has been starred 92,300 times at the time of writing, but we also reached yet another milestone this December: crossing the threshold of 100,000 issues.
To celebrate the occasion (and snatch the coveted number) our Release Manager wrote a heartwarming blogpost that cannot be done justice by summarizing — so go read it for yourself!

The “autobonker” Ballionaire shows how fun physics can be. Assemble your pachinko boards strategically and watch the effects go wild.
Concluding our walk through memory lane, the only thing left to say is thank you. To those of you who contribute to the engine by code, donations, or growing the community through content creation. To our users, who help promote the project with their own success and battletest new features in real time. We also want to once again thank our corporate sponsors for believing in what we do. Lastly, I want to give a shoutout to my wonderful colleagues, for if they weren’t so incredibly dedicated to organizing and maintaining a collaboration this big, none of this would be possible either.
Don’t forget to sign up for “The Nodeletter”, to receive more summaries and highlights like these, but up to twice a month!
Libre Arts: Weekly recap — 26 January 2025
Our first GodotCon in the US – Save the date!
Up until now, we held all of our annual GodotCon events in Europe, but after the request of many of you and thanks to help from Boston Game Dev and the Boston Godot Users Group, we are finally able to bring the event to the US for the first time.
Information
📅 Dates | 5th, 6th, 7th of May |
🕑 Time | 8AM – 6PM |
🇺🇲 Location | Boston, Massachusetts |
📍 Venue | Microsoft NERD. 1 Memorial Dr, Cambridge, MA 02142, United States |
Call for speakers and sponsors
If you would like to be a part of the conference by giving a talk or a workshop, please submit your proposals through the link below. We are looking for a diverse range of topics, from beginner to advanced, so don’t hesitate to submit your ideas.
➡️ Call for submissions, Deadline: 23th of February
We are also actively looking for sponsors to support GodotCon Boston. If you or your company would be interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, feel free to reach out to godotcon@godotengine.org.
Tickets and more
Tickets will be available soon, so stay tuned for more information by joining the GodotCon Discord or the mailing list.
Will there still be a European edition in 2025?
Absolutely! We are excited to confirm that a European GodotCon is also in the works for later this year. Stay tuned for more updates as we finalize the details.
See you soon!