The third beta version of Godot 4.4 has been released. The Godot developers are in the process of preparing a release candidate and invites users who have not yet participated in the beta releases to take part. 

Key features in Godot 4.4 cover the introduction of .uid files, enhancements to Embedded/Floating Window mode, and advancements in lightmap baking. The release contains enhancements for animation, audio, and additional features. The update also resolves concerns related to the sprite frames editor, audio issues with samples, and GodotPositionReportingProcessor, as well as fixes for both the editor and export functionalities. Additional enhancements comprise a resolution for the WebSocket wslay multi-frame message parsing, an update for the availability of the FileChooser and Settings interface, and a correction for shadow peter-panning with the default spotlight.

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.4 beta 3

Woah, another beta build already? You’re not imagining things, it’s only been a week since our last release. The team is fully in the swing of getting release-blockers merged, so we’re able to expedite output. What’s more, our community has been on the ball with submitting regression reports; thanks to everyone who’s involved themselves!

While progress has been at a rate we’re all excited about, it’s not over yet! We’ll likely do one more beta release the following week, but after that we hope to be gearing up for release candidates. If you haven’t already, we encourage users who haven’t engaged with the beta releases to do so and help us catch the last few stragglers.

Please, consider  supporting the project financially, if you are able. Godot is maintained by the efforts of volunteers and a small team of paid contributors. Your donations go towards sponsoring their work and ensuring they can dedicate their undivided attention to the needs of the project.

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.

Highlights

For an overview of what’s new overall in Godot 4.4, have a look at the highlights for  4.4 beta 1, which cover a lot of the changes. This blog post only covers the changes between beta 2 and beta 3. This section covers the most relevant changes made since the  beta 2 snapshot, which are largely regression fixes.

UID upgrade tool

The introduction of .uid files remains one of the biggest changes to the 4.4 release cycle, so much so that we gave it a  dedicated article. However, it hasn’t been the most straightforward system, particularly for those that are attempting to upgrade their projects from 4.3. In order to address this,  Malcolm Anderson has put together a UID upgrade tool to automate this process ( GH-103071).

Porting fixes to Embedded/Floating Window mode

The Embedded/Floating game window option added in 4.4 is proving to be quite popular, but also exposes all kinds of quirks on various systems with how they deal with windows.  Hilderin did impressive work to track and fix these issues, with pull requests such as GH-102104, GH-102238, GH-102251, GH-102311,  GH-102312, GH-102470, and more! The experience should be much better already in beta 3.

Lightmap baking improvements

Clay John changed the logic for baking direct lighting in LightmapGI to spread it over multiple frames, avoiding a spike of computation that can lead the OS to trigger TDR, resulting in a crash of the GPU context ( GH-102257). With some further fixes like  GH-102424,  GH-102497, and  GH-102477, lightmap baking got a nice upgrade in this snapshot.

And more!

• Animation: Fix incomplete FPS spinbox display in sprite frames editor ( GH-101798).
• Audio: Web: Fix audio issues with samples and GodotPositionReportingProcessor ( GH-102163).
• Core: Add explicit error messages to Multimesh functions ( GH-101109).
• Core: Fix Basis::get_euler incorrectly simplifying rotations in some cases ( GH-102144).
• Core: Fix is_valid_float, Variant parser, Expression parser, script highlighter, and TextServer not handing capital E in scientific notation ( GH-102396).
• Editor: Fix resource details will unexpectedly expand ( GH-101817).
• Editor: Improve UID file creation condition ( GH-102489).
• Editor: Optimize classnames enumeration ( GH-101489).
• Editor: Revert “EditorResourcePicker: Replace options to load file with button for QuickOpenDialog” ( GH-102196).
• Editor: Use FlowContainer for Profiler and Visual Profiler bars ( GH-102024).
• Export: Disable Metal and Vulkan renderers in simulator builds. Remove simulator support from editor/exporter ( GH-102179).
• GDExtension: Fix memory leak when ClassDB::bind_method_custom() fails ( GH-102131).
• GDScript: Fix uppercase B and X parsing in the integer literals ( GH-102400).
• GUI: Fix TextEdit mouse selection and scroll cancel ( GH-91778).
• GUI: Fix TextEdit visible line count when setting text ( GH-102296).
• GUI: Introduce Viewport functions for keeping the mouse over state consistent ( GH-99890).
• GUI: Prevent tooltip from showing when hovering past the end of script line ( GH-100913).
• Network: Fix WebSocket wslay multi-frame message parsing (again) ( GH-102128).
• Porting: FreeDesktop portal: Check for FileChooser and Settings interface availability instead of assuming it’s always available ( GH-101812).
• Porting: Implement get_length() for pipes ( GH-102365).
• Rendering: 2D: Fix clip children and rendering artefacts ( GH-102161).
• Rendering: Add loop annotations to ubershaders to prevent loop unrolling ( GH-102480).
• Rendering: Fix shadow peter-panning with default spotlight ( GH-101952).
• Rendering: Fully enable HDR2D when the setting is changed ( GH-102177).
• Rendering: Mark pipeline compilation of ubershaders as high priority ( GH-102125).
• Rendering: Metal: Enable GPU buffer address support ( GH-101602).
• Rendering: Use a smaller epsilon for omni and spot attenuation cutoff ( GH-102272).
• Shaders: Fix source_color default value ( GH-101642).
• Thirdparty: Harmonize patches to document downstream changes ( GH-102242).

Changelog

51 contributors submitted 116 improvements for this release. See our  interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since the 4.4-beta2 snapshot. You can also review  all changes included in 4.4 compared to the previous 4.3 feature release.

This release is built from commit  06acfccf89.

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.4 beta 3