The second release candidate of Godot 4.2 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.

Release candidate: Godot 4.2 RC 2

Since our  first release candidate for Godot 4.2 a week ago, a number of regressions have been reported by new testers who were starting to use Godot 4.2 in production. So we’ve been busy this week triaging, testing, debugging, and fixing regressions to reach a point where we’re confident that we’re ready for the stable release.

That’s where this second release candidate comes in, polished as much as we can and ready to be trialed on all your Godot 4.1 projects, hopefully as a smooth upgrade! If you notice anything off that’s not already listed under the  known issues below, please make sure to report it quickly so we can keep track of it in our release planning.

This release candidate includes a number of big changes that warrant particular attention:

• Many users have been running into spurious slot >= slot_max errors in their release exports in Godot 4.0 and 4.1, typically around changing scenes or otherwise manipulating nodes in the scene tree. We finally managed to debug and fix this properly ( GH-85280), which should solve a lot of issues, including crashes on Windows. This change should find its way in a 4.1.x maintenance release too.
• For Windows builds, we kept running into issues with MinGW’s implementation of std::thread and related threading classes. We replaced it with the third-party  mingw-std-threads library, which seems to solve the issues we had, and should also improve performance. Integrating such a library so late in the release cycle is a risky change, but we ran out of alternatives to workaround those threading issues, and the first test results are promising. Please make sure to test our Windows builds heavily on projects using multithreading.
• The tool we made to upgrade 4.1 mesh surfaces to the new 4.2 format works well, but the way it showed itself as an immediate dialog could cause some rendering deadlocks in the editor. So we changed it to a less intrusive warning, which will encourage you to run the tool yourself via the ‘Project > Tools > Upgrade Mesh Surfaces…’ entry. It’s easier to miss, but it’s better than a frozen editor.
• As a reminder, since beta 5, we provide pre-compiled ARM64 and ARM32 Linux binaries (editor and templates). RC 2 improves this new set of binaries by temporarily disabling LTO, which seemed to cause crashes on at least Raspberry Pi OS. Please try it out if you have such ARM Linux systems!

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.

Release candidate: Godot 4.2 RC 2