Godot 4.5 is nigh [preview] (Patreon)

Godot 4.5 is almost here, and I just finished compiling a list of its most notable features that I could find.Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZcMivTrXkY

This releases actually started quite slow, most fixes and minor features being added. So much so that I thought this would be mostly a stability focused released.

But just a few months ago things started to pick up and a lot of incredible new features suddenly started appearing.

Not to mention quite a few incredible performance boosts. We now finally have stencil support for Godot. And we can now make some incredible new effects that was just not possible before.

Stencil Shaders

I just learned how to use stencil shaders for this release, and I got to tell you, they are very fun to work with.

At first they confused me to no end, but after understanding that they are just masks your materials use to know if they should render to the screen or not, now I find the simplicity of them quite refreshing.

There are a lot of cool effects that you can do really easily too.

I've playing around making the stencil classics: a boat shader, a portal shader, and the per-object post-effect.

Besides that, Godot now has a one-click outline using stencils for the standard material.So you don't even need to know a thing about stencils to enjoy its benefits.Just check the box and you have outline and xrays. Neat.

Quality of Life

Then we got some really useful quality of life improvements.

The animation player is now much nicer to use. With sorting, click to move the playhead, and finally a much needed multi-select for bezier curves.

EditorScripts have been given some love and are now finally useful without having to hide the 3D view. You can even set shortcuts for them.

Big changes

Some less visually impressive but much important changes happened in this realease.

Godot now uses SDL3 for its input. Which means a lot of Joypad/Controller inputs bugs should be fixed. And we'll also get support for console specific things such as adaptative triggers, saving much maintenance time from Godot's team by simple using the more robust and mature SDL3 input.

WebAssembly now has SIMD support. Which means a lot of extra FPS for web builds.Which in some extreme cases can gift you 10x fps increase. (But most likely it'll double the FPS for physics-intensive games in the web)

In the same vein as that, navmesh sync is now asycn. Which will give you a lot of extra performance for complex navmesh maps. (Not so much on simple navmeshes)

And tilemaps now smartly create collision tiles only when needed. So it won't overuse the physics engine by creating a single collision for each and every tile.

And we now have a SkeletonModifier3D that constrains 2 bones together that are a life saver to fix animations and make them behave better in extreme cases.

Gdscript

Gdscript script got lots of cool improvements. And it now even has abstract classes and variadic functions if you can believe it.

Other stuff

UID's have been more flushed out. External materials now uses UIDs that were missing. You now create preloads with UID's by default, and there is a new toggle to display UID or the pathname for the asset in the inspector in some places.

We also got a new texture type, DPITexture. Now you can use dynamically scaled svgs.And this also means is that some icons in Godot's UI are now sharper, specially in high DPI resolutions.

And a lot of more things that I won't talk about here.

Conclusion and video

There are some great new features in this release.

I've just finished recording the videos. Now I just need to organize the order I'm going to talk about them, record the voice, and edit the video.

It seems Godot 4.5 will be releases this week (today?).

The github commit just updated their translations (which happens just before the release tag).So I'm guessing we'll see the official 4.5 release tag today (Monday).But sometimes they still take a few days to announce due to making the release page.

And now that I think about it, I might be late to release this 4.5 feature video.

I'll try to finish everything tonight. But if they release the announcement today, then I'll be late for my video.

But that's it. Just an update on Godot 4.5 new features.Hopefully you'll see a video coming up soon.