Godot have recently released a trio of articles outlining the near future of Godot Engine development, now that Godot 4 is here. First we have an update to the development schedule of the Godot engine starting with Godot 4.1. Second, we have an update on the features of Godot 4.1 rendering team are working on. Finally, we have the first beta release of Godot 3.6.
About the Godot 4.1 release schedule changes:
The current plan is for the feature merging phase to be approximately 3 months long. For 4.1, this would mean it will cover March, April, and May 2023. During the feature merging phase we will gladly merge all pull requests that are ready to be merged and are approved by the relevant teams. This includes new features, regular bug fixes, and riskier bug fixes that we wouldn’t merge during the bug fixing phase.
Our goal is to reduce the pressure to get big changes merged “in time for the next release”. Since the next release will always be only a few months away, we can safely defer merging until the following release to give contributors time to properly implement and test new features. We hope this will enable us to have significantly shorter bug fixing phases.
-snip-
The current plan is for the bug fixing phase to be approximately 1 month long. For 4.1, we plan for the bug fixing phase to cover the month of June with our anticipated release of 4.1 being the end of June 2023.
We expect this time period will need tweaking as we see how much dedicated bug fixing time we need to stabilize after 3 months of feature merging.
In regards to the efforts the rendering team are focusing on, key features include:
- Identify bottlenecks in 3D rendering (i.e. main scene shader)
- Time slicing DirectionalLight3D shadows
- Background pipeline compilation
- General Bug Fixing
- Proper multi-threading in the RenderingDevice
- GL Compatibility renderer – 3D
- FSR 2.2 / TAA improvements
Key Links
Godot 4.x Release Management Changes
Godot 4.1 Rendering Development Priorities
You can learn more about the near future of Godot 4.x, the Beta 3.6 release and Godot 4.1 rendering priorities in the video below.