Dev snapshot: Godot 4.3 dev 2
We left for the holiday season with a first snapshot towards Godot 4.3, and we came back to work after a good break to literal piles of pull requests ready to be merged! Godot development never really stops with hundreds of contributors all over the world, each with their own motivations for when and how to contribute to the engine.
So the past couple of weeks have been focused on merging many of the pull requests, old and new, which have been approved by their respective teams or maintainers. Many of those have been in the pipeline for a long time, getting ready during the stabilization of the 4.2 release, and waiting for their turn to enter the appropriate dev cycle. We’ll highlight some of those which found their way into this dev snapshot, and which might warrant particular attention and testing:
The acyclic command graph for Rendering Device is finally merged ( GH-84976)! This is an optimization and a feature which automatically records and re-orders rendering commands in the RenderingDevice backend, enabling optimizations which wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and greatly simplifying the API. This builds on top of the RenderingDeviceDriver refactoring ( GH-83452) which was merged for the previous dev snapshot.
The 4.2 release was packed with improvements in the animation area, but there’s more to come for 4.3! The user experience when zooming on the animation timeline should be much nicer ( GH-85142), and both long-standing bugs and regressions are being addressed in the handling of tracks with name conflicts ( GH-86687).
New C# users have long been struggling with the fact that properties with the
[Export]attribute don’t reflect their changes immediately in the Inspector. As C# is a compiled language, the project needs to be compiled before Godot can add new properties or update existing ones. We now keep track of the last modification date of relevant C# scripts to show users a warning in case the exported properties that they see in the Inspector may be out of date ( GH-85869).It may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but a common papercut for Nvidia users has now been solved – the Y axis should stop flickering when rotating the 3D viewport :) ( GH-83895).
Shoutout to Mickeon who has done an outstanding overhaul of the Node ( GH-68560) and OS ( GH-80282) classes’ documentation, as well as adding more autocompletion hints to a lot of engine APIs, which should make your scripting experience much nicer when using methods whose parameters can be inferred from the project’s context.
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.
The second development build of Godot 4.3 is now available for testing.
