Dev snapshot: Godot 4.1 beta 2
Continuing on our planned schedule for Godot 4.1, we’re advancing through the beta phase and getting ready for a stable release in early July. The feature freeze happened in late May, and we had a first beta release last week. If you missed them, have a look at the 4.1 beta 1 release notes for a great write-up by Yuri on what’s new in this milestone.
For this beta 2 build specifically, we’ve outlined a number of relevant changes below. Some key highlights you might want to pay particular attention to:
- Core: Let user scripts disable thread safety checks ( GH-78000).
- The thread guards added in 4.1 may have unexpected effects on your own usage of Threads if you know that you’re not breaking thread safety. This new option lets you tell Godot “I know what I’m doing” and disable the thread guards for a given thread.
- GDExtension: Standardize Object ptrcall encoding on
Object **( GH-77410).
- This change was necessary to fix a number of crashes, but it breaks compatibility with Godot 4.0’s GDExtension API in a way that we cannot easily work around. This was evaluated as a necessary tradeoff to make GDExtension usable in production, but it means that you will need to keep separate branches or add your own compatibility code for Godot 4.0 and Godot 4.1+ GDExtension interfaces if you want to support both.
- GDScript: Sort code autocompletion with rules ( GH-75746).
- The way sorting worked for code completion in 4.0 was quite unpredictable in many situations, ranking less pertinent results higher than perfect matches. This has been heavily reworked and should now perform much closer to what you would expect.
- GUI: Ensure that controls update all their sizing information when required ( GH-78009).
- We’d like to have more user testing of this change on GUI heavy projects, to ensure that we’re not introducing regressions.
- Input: Fix just pressed and released with short presses ( GH-77055).
- Have a look at the PR and make sure it behaves like you’d expect :)
- Shaders: Fix shader uniform storage conversions and crash ( GH-74937).
- This fixed a bazillion issues with shader uniforms, so be sure to report if anything regressed, or if it actually fixed some issue you reported in the past.
Jump to the Downloads section, and give it a spin right now, or continue reading to learn more about changes that come in Godot 4.1. 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 showing Beehave ( GitHub), an addon for Godot 3.x and 4.x that enables you to create robust AI systems using behavior trees. It is developed by bitbrain, who also makes Godot tutorials on YouTube, as well as developing a Dwarven RPG with Godot 4. Follow them on Twitter, Mastodon or join his Discord.
The second beta version of Godot 4.1 is now available. The Godot Engine is a free, all-in-one, cross-platform game engine that makes it easy for you to create 2D and 3D games.
