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Last week, we released the first of our Release Candidate builds, a state suitable for production settings. This is the second entry, and already shaping up to be our last, as all relevant release blockers have been dealt with! While we prepare for the stable release—no more than a week’s time from now—let’s enjoy one last roundup of changes.

Please, consider supporting the project financially, if you are able. Godot is maintained by the efforts of volunteers and a small team of paid contributors. Your donations go towards sponsoring their work and ensuring they can dedicate their undivided attention to the needs of the project.

Jump to the Downloads section, and give it a spin right now, or continue reading to learn more about improvements in this release. You can also try the Web editor or the Android editor for this release. If you are interested in the latter, please request to join our testing group to get access to pre-release builds.

The original cover illustration is from Stray Path, a roguelike card game where optimization is key to unraveling the mystery of this stray world. Developed by chx games, the game was just released on Steam.

Highlights

We covered the most important highlights from Godot 4.4 in the previous 4.4 beta 1 blog post, so if you haven’t read that one, have a look to be introduced to the main new features added in the 4.4 release.

Especially if you’re testing 4.4 for the first time, you’ll want to get a condensed overview of what new features you might want to make use of.

This section covers changes made since the previous RC 1 snapshot, which are mostly regression fixes, or “safe” fixes to longstanding issues:

Buildsystem: Fix libtheora optimizations causing errors in calling function for x86_64 Windows (GH-103176).
Buildsystem: Fix compiling on arm64 Linux with GCC (GH-103303).
Core: Use atomic flag to prevent flush_if_pending from reading unlocked command_mem (GH-103298).
Editor: Fix Embedded Game window wrong first startup location and size (GH-103105).
Editor: Fix plugin icons not displayed (GH-103143).
Editor: Load docks layout after their position is initialized (GH-103266).
Export: Fix cross-platform configuration of rendering driver settings (narrower approach) (GH-103197).
GDExtension: Bind new core METHOD_FLAG_VIRTUAL_REQUIRED bitfield (GH-103302).
GUI: Fix Tree hover position with multiple columns (GH-103168).
GUI: Fix label clipping when ascent/descent are fractional (GH-103192).
GUI: Label: Fix rounding errors with fractional scale (GH-103224).
I18n: CSV import: Generate positve UID for .translation and follow renames (GH-103120).
Import: bcdec: Fix unnecessary alignment of texture resolution when only one of its dimensions isn’t divisible by 4 (GH-103259).
Network: mbedTLS: Integrate TLS handshake defragmentation PR (GH-103247).
Porting: Fix Embedded Game does not focus when mouse over on Windows (GH-103052).
Porting: Android Editor: Fix expand button black bar issue (GH-103117).
Porting: Android: Fix excessive getRotation calls (GH-103122).
Rendering: Metal: Compile MTLLibrary on demand when pipeline is created (GH-103185).
Rendering: Windows: Offload RenderingDevice creation test to subprocess (GH-103245).
Rendering: texture_create_from_native_handle() should return RID for texture from RenderingServer, not RenderingDevice (GH-103296).

Changelog

19 contributors submitted 31 fixes for this release. See our interactive changelog for the complete list of changes since the 4.4-rc1 snapshot. You can also review all changes included in 4.4 compared to the previous 4.3 feature release.

This release is built from commit 01545c995.

Downloads

Download Godot 4.4 rc2

Standard build includes support for GDScript and GDExtension.

.NET build (marked as mono) includes support for C#, as well as GDScript and GDExtension.

.NET 8.0 or newer is required for this build, changing the minimal supported version from .NET 6 to 8.

While engine maintainers try their best to ensure that each preview snapshot and release candidate is stable, this is by definition a pre-release piece of software. Be sure to make frequent backups, or use a version control system such as Git, to preserve your projects in case of corruption or data loss.

Known issues

During the Release Candidate stage, we focus exclusively on solving showstopping regressions (i.e. something that worked in a previous release is now broken, without workaround). You can have a look at our current list of regressions and significant issues which we aim to address before releasing 4.4. This list is dynamic and will be updated if we discover new blocking issues after more users start testing the RC snapshots.

With every release, we are aware that there are going to be various issues which have already been reported but haven’t been fixed yet, due to limited resources. See the GitHub issue tracker for a complete list of known bugs.

Bug reports

As a tester, we encourage you to open bug reports if you experience issues with this release. Please check the existing issues on GitHub first, using the search function with relevant keywords, to ensure that the bug you experience is not already known.

In particular, any change that would cause a regression in your projects is very important to report (e.g. if something that worked fine in previous 4.x releases, but no longer works in this snapshot).

Support

Godot is a non-profit, open source game engine developed by hundreds of contributors on their free time, as well as a handful of part and full-time developers hired thanks to generous donations from the Godot community. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed their time or their financial support to the project!

If you’d like to support the project financially and help us secure our future hires, you can do so using the Godot Development Fund.

By Thaddeus Crews

Also published here