A new development snapshot of Godot 4.2 has been released. The Godot Engine is a free, cross-platform game engine that allows you to easily create 2D and 3D games.

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.2 dev 4

We’re making great progress in the development branch for Godot 4.2! The faster paced release cycle we started following after the 4.0 release seems to be working well, with pull requests being opened, reviewed, and merged at a steady rate. This fourth dev snapshot contains nearly 250 PRs merged in a little over 3 weeks since the  dev 3 snapshot.

The overall state of the master branch seems pretty good and on track for reaching the beta stage at the start of October, and stable in early November 2023.

This snapshot brings a lot of goodies! Here are some of the highlights, with a bigger list available  below:

• The initial support for C# on Android merged for dev 3 ( GH-73257) is now ready for mass testing! Official export templates are provided in the .NET (“Mono”) build, so you can start exporting your C# projects to Android and give us feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that this feature requires using .NET 7.0 as the target framework, which you can set in the .csproj file with <TargetFramework>net7.0</TargetFramework>. It’s still a work in progress, with caveats outlined in the PR. Notably, we already know that it’s not working on the arm32 architecture.

• A number of rendering bugfixes and improvements were merged for this snapshot, including:
  • Motion vectors for skeletons/blend shapes and particles ( GH-80618 and  GH-80688). This is the last bit of work necessary before we implement AMD’s FSR 2.2 into Godot. On that note, there is already a PR for FSR 2.2 support ( GH-81197), so please test it out and give us your feedback.
  • Fixing a crash caused by having more than 204 Lights/Decals/ReflectionProbes in a scene at once ( GH-80845). This bug stopped users from fully flexing the strength of the Forward+ renderer as it limited users to a combined 204 OmniLight3Ds/SpotLight3Ds/Decals/ReflectionProbes (by default). Now users are free to use up to 512 of each in the default configuration (this limit can be increased).
  • Additionally, rendering contributors have been busy removing barriers and preparing to implement more items from the list of  rendering priorities.

• A solution was finally merged ( GH-80859) for an infamous input bug affecting the typical input action combinations used for character movement (e.g. WASD + D-Pad). We’re expecting potential regressions (and already found one, with a pending fix as  GH-81170), so please test it thoroughly and report any issue.

• GDScript got a number of bug fixes, but also new features such as static typing for for loop variables ( GH-80247), improved documentation generation ( GH-80745), and the possibility to use local constants (e.g. preloaded scripts) as type hints ( GH-80964).

• Initial work was merged to improve the developer experience with GDExtension on Windows, by copying DLLs to a temporary location before opening them ( GH-80188). This makes it possible to overwrite the original DLL (e.g. by compiling a new version) without running into Windows file locking conflicts. This paves the way to implementing live reloading of GDExtension, for which a PR is currently open and ready for testing ( GH-80284).

• The editor got a lot of usability improvements, such as custom color support for project folders in the FileSystem dock ( GH-80440), and improvements to the signals connection dock ( GH-80411,  GH-81092).

• On the import side, support was merged for the KTX image format so that we can use Basis Universal for GLTF ( GH-76572).

• A project setting was added to define the content scale stretch modes, implementing the long-requested integer scaling out of the box ( GH-75784).

Keep in mind that while we try to make sure each dev snapshot is stable enough for general testing, 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 a case of corruption or data loss.

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.

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.2 dev 4