The community has been waiting for 3 years for this moment, Godot 4.0 is officially out! Godot 4 is light, it is fast and it is free.
Let me say this Godot 4.0 is HUGE.
The news was announced on Godot’s official site. Their post covers a very big list of all the new features and improvements and in this post, I’ll try my best to bring most of those points.
Previously in 2022
Godot’s team worked hard last year, they managed to bring not only updates to Godot 3 but enter Godot 4 in the alpha phase and later, in September, Godot entered the beta phase. The beta phase peace was fast one beta per week, each Friday, for a total of 17 alphas and 17 betas.
Release Candidate fever
There have been 6 release candidates (RC), this part of the development of Godot 4 was quite unregular. Easly these 6 RC could have been just 3. There was not enough time passed between each release, overlapping even in the same week. There was not enough time to actually appreciate the news in the release. Probably this is just me. I felt their urge to finally get to the release of the official version of Godot 4.0.
Why Godot 4 is now a Big Deal
Godot 3 is a good piece of software, it is the stable version that most of you should choose at the moment for production. G3 is heavily supported by 3rd party companies especially if you want to port your game to consoles like PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. I’m quite sure that, soon Godot 4 will receive the same support for those platforms as well.
It was never a mystery, everyone knows it, Godot 3 doesn’t shine for its 3d. And this was something that always put Godot behind Unity, Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, CryEngine, or whatever engine out there used for AAA commercial games.
Godot 4 has a new renderer, Vulkan. Open-gl is still available if you want to work with lower-end machines. Vulkan is the future.
This ports to better lightning and better shadows of the 3d scene. There are no more excuses for Godot to not be at the Top with all the deserved merits.
Godot 4 is light, it is fast and it is free.
All the NEW Features
There have been a lot of improvements and features in Godot 4. The editor has changed, GdScript has changed, Shader Editor has changed, Rendering has changed, 2D has changed.
Down you’ll find a list that links directly to Godot’s official post, I just copied it from the official post since it is tedious to actually write and link each section.