While we prepare for the stable release—no more than a week’s time from now—let’s enjoy one last roundup of changes.

Hype! Looking forward to updating my projects to the newest version.

It’s not a thing and I totally agree it should exist, there’s a proposal for it on GitHub.

If you want to handle different types, the right way of doing it is giving your parameter a generic type then checking what it is in the function.

func _ready():
    handle_stuff(10)
    handle_stuff("Hello")

func handle_stuff(x: Variant):
    if x is int:
        print("%d is an integer" % x)
    elif x is String:
        print("%s is a string" % x)

This prints 10 is an integer and Hello is a string.

If you really, really need to have a variable amount of arguments in your function, you can pass an array. It’s pretty inefficient but you can get away with it.

func handle_stuff(stuff: Array):
    for x: Variant in stuff:
        if x is int:
            print("%d is an integer" % x)
        elif x is String:
            print("%s is a string" % x)

Then you can pass [10, 20, 30] into it or something. It’s a useful trick.

Not mentioned in this post but if anyone was thinking about using 4.4 for web exports, wait a little more. There’s still a pretty bad issue with audio cackling that hasn’t been fixed yet (though there’s a PR submitted for it, so it might make it to beta 3).

I can’t wait for the new game tab. There’s been at least a few times where I needed to go through something frame-by-frame to see what’s going on.

This is great, I’ve always liked gliding games!

Some feedback:

1. The one thing that threw me off was how delayed flapping your wings is. Pressing space means you’d flap maybe 1.5 seconds later. It would be great if flapping was way faster and you’d instead have a cooldown animation, rather than waiting and then flapping the wings.

2. It might just be a skill issue, but I felt like boosting is too fast and I constantly overshot the finish.

3. It would be great if you can see the score of each completed level in the main menu.

Not sure about the context of a game, but I’ve used this to replace some UI nodes when the game switches to portrait mode on mobile. Sometimes it’s just easier to use different containers.

From what I understand: 3D performance in general needs to be improved. Even if you’re not rendering them, having tens of thousands of nodes in the tree kills performance. The global illumination used in Godot is also really taxing. Terrains are an extension rather than built-in to the engine and probably doesn’t have feature parity with other engines’ terrain systems.

4.4 did a lot to improve things but there’s still a ways to go before big open worlds can happen.

I’ve been meaning to post some of my stuff to Flatpak when Godot 4.4 releases but never bothered to look into it. This is perfect, thanks for sharing!

They explain their reasoning here: https://godotengine.org/article/about-official-console-ports/ .

Very good stuff in this update! The new page quickly showing all the changes is also a lot easier to digest than a 5,000 word essay blog post.

I’ve already been on 4.3 since the dev previews, so more than anything I’m excited for this release so the team can finally get to merging all those PRs that were shelved for 4.4. Lots of performance optimizations and big changes I’m excited for are coming in that next update. The wait continues!

Their release page has a rundown of everything new

Finally, audio cackling in web builds should be fixed!

I’ve been following this proposal around for the past few months, it’s really interesting. Godot could be the de-facto library for complex 3D rendering in any app since it’s really feature-rich and not that huge (I think the runtime is like ~60 megabytes? It could likely be smaller with further optimization and stripping features you don’t need).

Also I don’t remember who said this but if this goes through it could allow C# web builds by loading Godot is a library.

Kind of a shame this came as 4.3 is in feature freeze, it would’ve been nice for it to be included in the next update.

One of the devs wrote a blog post a while back talking about his first impressions with Godot.

TL;DR: Really positive on Godot but things that should be improved are text and how Godot handles texture atlases (I totally agree on both)

This is awesome! Wish I could run something like this on my car’s tablet, then we could go full circle.

Just my personal hot take haha, had nothing but bad experiences with Python.

Honestly GDscript is really easy to learn if you’ve got a programming background. The concepts are mostly the same so you can head over to the GDScript reference and learn to use it in less than a day. As soon as you get used to the syntax you basically know it already.