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 2

These final days of July mark the end of the first month of the Godot 4.2 development cycle, and things are starting to pick up steam. With Godot contributors having had a few weeks to agree on, work on, review, and approve some of the new features, bigger changes are starting to appear in the upcoming dev snapshots.

As always, we try to offer a mix of smaller improvements, bug fixes, and bigger features for the Godot community to test and provide feedback. Here are some of the highlights in 4.2 dev2, with a bigger list available  below:

• The tilemaps system and the tilemaps editor are going through an internal rework, aimed at creating a foundation for the most requested improvements ( GH-78328). The work will continue and you should see more user-facing changes in the upcoming builds. In the meantime a menagerie of workflow enhancements has been added, both in a form of improved tooling ( GH-79512,  GH-79899) and more UI hints ( GH-79676,  GH-79904).

• In the core area of the engine, maintainers have worked on addressing some design limitations. With these changes included you should no longer experience crashes when trying to change scenes on the fly ( GH-78988) or when renaming nodes during the ready step ( GH-78706).

• You can now interact with and extend the OpenXR API through GDExtension ( GH-68259)! Support for another previously missing feature, indexed properties, has also been added ( GH-79763).

• The script debugger now comes with full support for threaded code ( GH-76582), including the execution stack and breakpoints. This is something that has been requested since Godot 3 days, and now with better multithreading support of Godot 4 it is finally possible to debug extra threads.

• This release also includes a security fix, previously disclosed in the 4.0.4 RC1 blog post. If your project uses ENetMultiplayerPeer or low level ENetConnection, there is a potential denial of service attack that utilizes a flaw in the ENet library. We strongly recommend updating to this version once it is released as stable. Be sure to test the build right now to prepare and have a smooth transition. Thanks to  Facundo Fernández for reporting this vulnerability. A patch has been submitted to the upstream ENet repository as well.

• On the rendering side of things there is a constant influx of fixes and improvements to both Vulkan and GLES backends. Of top of that, this release introduces the ability to create custom texture objects, which should be very useful to people dabbling in compute shaders ( GH-79288). You can see how it works in practice with this  soon-to-be merged compute texture demo.

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 2