Godot 4.8 Beta1 发布

The first Beta release of Godot 4.8 has arrived and it’s jam packed with features and improvements. This *should* be the feature complete version of what should ship with Godot 4.8, with the current feature set frozen. This is of course a beta, so shouldn’t be used in production environments.

Highlight features of Godot 4.8 include:

Here is the updated summary with the UI improvements consolidated into the top bullet:

• Massive Editor UI Improvements: The biggest highlight of this release is a comprehensive overhaul of editor UI features. The game view is now embedded into the main editor window by default, alongside main screen editors that have been converted into regular, undockable, and closable windows. Furthermore, quality-of-life enhancements like zoomable resource thumbnails, improved drag and drop indication and new hover visibility toggles in the scene tree make managing complex projects incredibly fast.
• Trail3D for VFX: A highly requested native 3D trail node has been added to make creating stunning visual effects accessible without requiring deep math knowledge. It provides an out-of-the-box solution that just works (It really is stupidly easy to use).
• Mip-level Texture Streaming: You can now dynamically load and unload images based on a camera’s relative position. This improves rendering performance and manages memory more effectively in larger scenes. While not quite texture streaming, it should greatly improve performance on texture dense games like open worlds.
• Focused GDScript Underlines & Refactoring: The editor now features focused in-editor underlines specifically designed to highlight GDScript warnings and errors without cluttering the screen. It also improves syntax highlighting performance and introduces powerful new GDScript refactoring capabilities.
• CanvasItem Game View Manipulation: You can now directly move, resize, rotate, and scale CanvasItems of your running game within the game view using a dedicated toolbar. It also supports full undo/redo and opening scenes via double-clicking.
• VisualShader Node Groups: To reduce bloat in complex shader graphs, you can now encapsulate frequently-used sections into reusable node groups. This cleans up messy boilerplate and makes shader development much more organized.
• Auto-Resizing UI Fonts: Labels and RichTextLabels now include properties for auto, minimum, and maximum font sizing. This automatically adjusts in-game text to fit constraints..
• Screen Space Contact Shadows: A new rendering feature creates an R8 shadow texture for each directional light and blends them with shadow maps. This delivers highly performant shadows without compromising visual quality.
• Built-in Android SDK Manager: The editor can now automatically download, set up, and manage the Android and Java SDKs with the click of a button. This dramatically streamlines the mobile export process.
• TextEdit & CodeEdit Touch Support: The script editors received major touch input upgrades, including tap-to-place cursor, drag-to-scroll, and double-tap for text selection. The code completion popup can now also be scrolled via touch.
• Core Engine Optimizations: Runtime RAM usage has been reduced by ~12mb by simplifying GDType, and object property access was accelerated by 1.6x. Removing many child nodes simultaneously is also noticeably faster.

Key Links

Godot Homepage

Godot 4.8 Beta Release Notes

You can learn more about the Godot 4.8 Beta in the video below. Special thanks to Synty Pass for sponsoring this video.