After 3+ years of breaking and rebuilding from the ground up, a complete core overhaul and a full engine rewrite, through 17 alphas, 17 betas and 6 release candidates, we're thrilled to announce that Godot 4.0 is out!
This is an achievement that we want to dedicate to our entire community — contributors, testers, and users like yourself! Together we create opportunities for many developers to make beautiful and creative games and apps, for free and with a refreshing ease. Godot 4 continues on that promise, improves all of the engine's areas, and begins a new cycle. It will serve as a foundation for many new releases in the future.
This is a new major release of Godot. This means that existing Godot 3 projects are not compatible with Godot 4. While Godot 4.0 comes with a built-in project convertor, adapting your games to the new version of the engine still requires manual labor on top of that. Some things need to be redone from scratch. Thus, upgrading requires some consideration, and for projects deep in development it's likely better to stay on Godot 3.
For that reason, Godot 4.0 will not be immediately available on Steam for all users, to prevent auto-updates from destroying your work (always do backups and use a Version Control System). Instead, for the next week you have time to decide if you want to start using Godot 4, or if you want to stick to Godot 3. Whichever you decide, go to the application settings for Godot Engine, select the Betas tab, and pick the branch that you want to use: the new stable-4.0 or the old and trusted stable-3.5 (or any previous version branch, we have all of them).
After a week has passed we will enable Godot 4.0 to all users on the default branch, so make sure to switch to stable-3.5 if you intend to keep using it. You can also download either version from the Godot website if you want to keep using multiple versions in parallel (Godot 4.0, Godot 3.x).
Well, that's enough precautions! At this point, you probably want to know what's so exciting about Godot 4. Read our biggest release blog post yet to learn all about new features and enhancements.
We released Godot 3.5 in early August, and like any release, there are few rough edges to iron out which warrant making maintenance "patch" releases (3.5.x). Such maintenance releases focus on fixing bugs and not on integrating new features. This helps guarantee that the overall production readiness of the stable branch keeps increasing.
So this 3.5.1 release fixes a number of regressions that users reported after the release, as well as various other fixes to pre-existing bugs and usability improvements.
This is a safe and recommended update for all Godot 3.5.x users. It should have no major incidence on your projects, even complex ones in production, if you're already using 3.5-stable.
As usual though, if you need to go back to the previous 3.5 version (3.5-stable), you can use the stable-3.5 beta branch in the Steam settings for the application.
The illustration picture is from Dome Keeper, an innovative roguelike survival miner with gorgeous artwork, developed by Bippinbits and published by Raw Fury. It was just released on Steam and the first players seem to love it, check it out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
After 9 months of development, Godot 3.5 is out and it comes fully packed with features and quality of life improvements!
While most development focus is on our upcoming Godot 4.0 release, many contributors and users want a robust and mature 3.x branch to develop and publish their games today, so it's important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. Most of work was aimed at implementing missing features or fixing bugs which are critical for publishing 2D and 3D games with Godot 3.x, and at making the existing features more optimized and reliable.
Godot 3.5 is compatible with Godot 3.4.x projects and is a recommended upgrade for all 3.4.x users.
It's been a while since our last stable release! And this is not the long anticipated 3.5, nor 4.0, but simply a Godot 3.4.5 maintenance release to fix a handful of issues in the current 3.4 stable branch.
This is a safe and recommended update for all Godot 3.4.x users. It should have no major incidence on your projects, even complex ones in production, if you're already using 3.4.4-stable.
Notable changes that motivate this release include:
Increase Android target API level to 31 to match Google Play requirements for new apps as of August 2022.
Update mbedtls and zlib libraries to fix security vulnerabilities.
Ignore support of S3TC compression format on mobile devices to ensure the use of ETC2 for GLES3 (fixes issues with Meta Quest 2 after a recent system update).
The illustration picture is from BLASTRONAUT, a gorgeous exploration and mining game set in a vast procedurally generated alien world, developed by Perfoon. It was just released on Steam as Early Access and it's an absolute blast, check it out!
In parallel to our work on the upcoming feature releases Godot 3.5 (with a second beta) and 4.0 (now at alpha 4!), we backport important fixes to the stable 3.4 branch for use in production.
Last month's 3.4.3 release was found to have a few regressions that could affect a lot of users, so we've been working on a bugfix-only release to solve those issues and a few other pre-existing issues. All users are advised to upgrade to Godot 3.4.4 for the best possible experience.
In parallel to our work on the upcoming feature releases Godot 3.5 (with a first beta) and 4.0 (now at alpha 3!), we backport important fixes to the stable 3.4 branch for use in production.
A number of such fixes have been queued in the two months since the 3.4.2 release, and we after a couple of Release Candidates (thanks to all testers!), we're now ready to release Godot 3.4.3-stable as a maintenance update to the current stable branch.
We released Godot 3.4.1 just a few days ago with a huge array of bugfixes, but a regression was then found for macOS rendering which could cause flickering.
This new Godot 3.4.2 is a hotfix release to solve this and a few other minor issues that were fixed in the meantime. Godot 3.4.2 is a recommended upgrade for all Godot 3.4 and 3.4.1 users.
For a detailed overview of the changes that 3.4.1 included and which are also part of this new release, please read the 3.4.1 release notes.
The illustration picture is from Quest Of Graal, a fast-paced combat platformer where up to 4 players race to catch the golden chalice. It is developed by Pixel-Archipel and scheduled to release in early 2022.
Godot 3.4 was released a month ago, and it went fairly smoothly! Many thanks to all the contributors who worked on it, including all testers who tried beta and RC releases to ensure that the 3.4-stable branch would be an easy and worthwhile upgrade path for all users.
No software release is perfect though, so there will always be some things to iron out, which is why we provide maintenance releases for stable branches, focusing on bugfixing and preserving compatibility (see our release policy). Godot 3.4.1 is the first maintenance release in the 3.4 stable branch, and a recommended upgrade for all Godot 3.4 users.
All Godot contributors are delighted to release our latest milestone today, Godot 3.4, after more than 6 months of development!
While most development focus is on our upcoming Godot 4.0 release, many contributors and users want a robust and mature 3.x branch to develop and publish their games today, so it's important for us to keep giving Godot 3 users an improved gamedev experience. As such, most of the focus was on implementing missing features or bugfixes which are critical for publishing 2D and 3D games with Godot 3, and on making the existing features more optimized and reliable.
Godot 3.4 is compatible with Godot 3.3.x projects and is a recommended upgrade for all 3.3.x users.
If you're not ready to upgrade to 3.4 yet, you can switch to the `stable-3.3` beta branch in the Steam Properties for Godot Engine, which currently provides Godot 3.3.4 stable. However we strongly recommend that all Godot 3.3.x users upgrade to Godot 3.4 for the many critical fixes that it provides.
While we're busy working on both the upcoming Godot 4.0 and 3.4 releases (with a dev snapshot for 3.4 beta 5 available now), we still cherry-pick important bug fixes to the 3.3 branch regularly for maintenance releases (see our release policy).
Godot 3.3.3 was released a month ago, and a handful of important fixes have been queued in the 3.3 branch since then. Most notably, users of the GDScript LSP in Visual Studio Code have been experiencing crashes in 3.3.3, which are fixed in this new Godot 3.3.4.
Godot 3.3.4,like all future 3.3.x releases, focuses purely on bug fixes, and aims to preserve compatibility. It is a recommended upgrade for all Godot 3.3 users.