Godot 4.4, a unified experience – Godot Engine

Now that the core feature set of Godot 4 feels stable, our contributors have shifted their efforts towards optimizing them across the board.

While many of the linked PRs were finished and tested before the 4.3 release, they did not make the merge deadline, resulting in a big batch for you to enjoy now.

Support for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) has been in the engine since Godot 3.1 and is a great tool for rapid prototyping.

Nonetheless, our internal implementation suffered from stability issues and other bugs. This is one of the engine areas that does not have a dedicated maintainer to look after it, so when an open source library with the same functionality was released, we jumped at the opportunity.

Manifold completely replaces the existing implementation, which is a fairly big change in how Godot handles CSG internally, but only minimally impacts the user API. Please check your projects after upgrading and report any negative consequences to us so they can be tackled!

With this brand new API you can create and dispose of temporary files and directories. In other words: you can write content on a disc without worrying about polluting user data. By default, any file/directory you create this way automatically disposes of itself after use.

Tool developers in particular should have a look at this new feature!

From now on, you don’t have to choose between fully baked or fully dynamic shadows anymore when using LightmapGI.

By enabling shadowmasks while baking your lightmaps, it is now possible to use static shadows in the distance and dynamic shadows up close. The lower resolutions far away will save precious resources, while the level of detail close to the player is not impacted.

Shortening the range of your dynamic shadows like so provides very important optimization, especially for mobile applications.

This is a quality of life improvement for anyone using big monitors or multi-monitor setups.

The Godot editor now keeps track of its window state: whether it is in fullscreen or windowed mode, which screen it is on, as well as its size and position.

These settings are then automatically restored when you open the program again.

Editor load speed improves once again. Large projects can expect a speed bump of up to 3x!

This benefits both the project startup and any operations that scan the filesystem.

If you want to capture profiling data while running your game - without missing the first few seconds of loading a scene - you will appreciate this new checkbox.

It will autostart all profilers when you run a project, rather than forcing you to tab out of the game to do it yourself.

No one wants to be met with a wall of errors after freshly importing their project from a version control system.

This used to happen because it is not necessary to push the .godot folder into your repositories, since it auto-generates upon opening your project for the first time. After that, you had to restart the editor to get rid of all the errors caused by broken references — not anymore!

The Godot editor has been available on Android devices for a while already, but until now you were forced to switch to a different OS to create the various platform binaries.

No more of that: download export templates onto your Android device and finalize your project right there.

The Android Frame Pacing library also known as Swappy helps games achieve smooth rendering and correct frame pacing on Android. The library handles multiple refresh rates if they are supported by the device, which gives a game more flexibility in presenting a frame.

As a developer, you don’t have to do anything to reap these benefits: they are automatic upon upgrading your project.

With the release of Godot 4.0, we moved our C# packages from targeting Mono to .NET 6. This version of .NET was released on November 8, 2021 and ended support on November 12, 2024.

Therefore, our next release will implement and raise the minimum required version to .NET 8; existing projects will automatically be upgraded when opened with Godot 4.4 while older releases will keep targeting .NET 6 to avoid breakage.

The Betsy texture compressor is a tool to compress images into various GPU texture formats. It is now being integrated into the Godot Engine.

Betsy runs on the GPU and is able to compress images significantly faster than our current compressors (using the “VRAM Compressed” import setting).

This change reduces import time dramatically.

Previously, glTF imports only allowed you to animate properties from this list: position, rotation, scale, and mesh blend shape weights.

This new extension now enables animations to target custom properties too! Think the color of a light, the FOV of a camera, the albedo color of a material, the UV offset of a material, …

The mappings between Godot properties and glTF Object Model JSON pointers can be defined via GDScript.

Navigation map synchronization has been moved to an asynchronous background thread.

This avoids slowing down the entire game during navigation updates, especially on lower-end systems. Instead, updates will happen less frequently when resources are limited.

The navigation code may very well be some of the oldest left in the engine’s codebase. Therefore the navigation team has taken up the task to clean up thoroughly and add improvements to outdated areas.

This release already contains plenty quality of life changes, from debug indicators to show the direction of navigation links, to supporting the obstactle node’s transform, and more. In general, navigation features are going to be faster, in no small part due to the pathfinding queries now using a new internal heap structure.

Batching is a performance optimization that drastically reduces the number of draw calls in a scene. The effect will be particularly noticeable in scenes with a lot of text rendering or repeated sprites sharing a texture.

Previously, this optimization was only available in the Compatibility renderer. This release brings batching to the other rendering backends as well, which should make 2D performance comparable amongst all of them.

In case you were trying to run Godot with the Forward+ or Mobile backends on a device that does not not actually support Vulkan, D3D12, or Metal, you used to be met with an OS alert that has proven to confuse users more than it is helpful.

This change instead automatically makes the engine fallback on the Compatibility renderer, which is based on OpenGL. For moments when you do not want this behavior, you can toggle it off in the project settings.

Users can now apply a mask on singular Light3D objects to select which rendering layers are considered when casting shadows.

By adding this level of control, dynamic lights can be further optimized and shadows selectively turned on/off.

This release adds support for shader instance uniforms to CanvasItem shaders.

They allow you to assign a different uniform value to each instance of the item, instead of having to compile two separate shaders to achieve this.

This approach is more performant than having to juggle materials, and does not break batching.

• Web development by Adam Scott.
• Texts by Nathalie Galla.
• Media content by Adam Scott using assets from
• Additional media content by tagged content creators.
• Release thumbnail by Tibo.
• Header background screenshot from the Outskirts environment demo by jedenjenda23.
• Design template by Luis Carli.