Godot 4.8-beta1

Preview

Godot Foundation, released Oct 19

Godot 4.8-beta1 is the first beta of Godot 4.8, with the feature set described as frozen. Its biggest change is a broad overhaul of editor UI, including the game view embedded in the main editor window by default.

Highlights

Game view is embedded in the main editor window by default, and main screen editors become undockable, closable windows
New Trail3D node for 3D trail VFX
Mip-level texture streaming loads and unloads images based on camera position
CanvasItems can be moved, resized, rotated and scaled in the running game's game view
Built-in Android SDK Manager downloads and sets up the Android and Java SDKs

Changelog

New10

Trail3D node for creating 3D trails
Mip-level texture streaming based on camera's relative position
CanvasItem manipulation in the game view with a dedicated toolbar, full undo/redo and opening scenes by double-click
VisualShader node groups to encapsulate reusable sections of shader graphs
Auto, minimum and maximum font size properties on Label and RichTextLabel
Screen space contact shadows that create an R8 shadow texture per directional light and blend it with shadow maps
Built-in Android SDK Manager that downloads, sets up and manages Android and Java SDKs
Focused in-editor underlines for GDScript warnings and errors
New GDScript refactoring capabilities
Hover visibility toggles in the scene tree

Improved9

Game view embedded in the main editor window by default
Main screen editors converted into regular, undockable, closable windows
Zoomable resource thumbnails
Improved drag and drop indication
Syntax highlighting performance
Touch support in TextEdit and CodeEdit: tap to place cursor, drag to scroll, double-tap to select text, scrollable code completion popup
Runtime RAM usage reduced by about 12 MB by simplifying GDType
Object property access is 1.6x faster
Removing many child nodes at once is faster

Before you upgrade

This is a beta and should not be used in production environments.