Godot 4.8 hits beta and freezes features
The first 4.8 beta puts Godot into feature freeze, so work now goes into fixing regressions. Highlights include Trail3D, mip-based texture streaming, visual shader node groups and Jolt Physics 5.6.
Godot 4.8 has reached its first beta. The Godot team published the snapshot on 15 October, and with it the 4.8 branch is now in feature freeze: no new features will land, and contributor time goes into finding and fixing regressions before the stable release.
The announcement is a round-up of what 4.8 will ship with, since most features already appeared in the dev snapshots before it. For 3D, there is a native Trail3D node for trail effects, so you no longer have to build trail meshes and UVs by hand. Rendering gains mip-level texture streaming: Godot loads only the mipmap level a texture actually needs, which the team says significantly cuts VRAM use. Visual shaders now support node groups, so you can package a commonly used chunk of a shader graph and reuse it.
The editor gets a lot of attention too. Running games can now have their CanvasItems moved, resized, rotated and scaled at runtime from the editor, with full undo and redo. The main screens have become regular editor docks, so they can be closed or floated (the Game screen is the one exception). The bundled Jolt Physics is updated to 5.6.0, and for Android exports the editor can now download, set up and manage the Android and Java SDKs for you.
Why it matters: if you are on Godot 4.7, this is the moment to test your project on 4.8 and report anything that breaks, while fixes are still the team's only focus. Beta builds are for testing, so keep production projects on a stable release and back up before opening them in 4.8.
Source: Godot Engine blog (official post, opens in a new tab)
