This has been another successful short release cycle for Godot 4, with
more than 1850 commits authored by over 350 contributors in 5 months!
We managed to publish 3 feature releases (4.0, 4.1, and 4.2) in a year,
for the first time ever. Despite the short development cycle, both 4.1
and 4.2 have been absolutely feature packed! We're happy with that
development pace overall, and ready to start planning our 2024 releases
with a similar workflow.
Thanks to all the contributors for your amazing work, and to the
Godot community at large for your incredible support <3
The feature freeze for 4.2 is now official, from here on we'll focus only
on fixing bugs to stabilize the development branch and release 4.2-stable
within a month.
Around 1500 commits from 300+ contributors merged over 4 months.
The new 4.x release cycle with 3 months of development and 1 month of
bugfixing proved to work fairly well for this 4.1 release, and we will
keep refining it for future releases.
The faster-paced release cycle means that each minor 4.x release will
have a small scope and won't be as impressive as the massive 4.0 was,
but it means that users get access to the new features and bug fixes
faster, and the stabilization phase is also significantly shortened
(only one month of feature freeze, so contributors don't need to wait
long to see their approved feature PRs merged for the next milestone).
Onwards to 4.2!
Faster release cycles are proving to work fairly well, and we have a lot more
confidence label the current state as RC as we've had in the past.
Let's get to 4.1-stable quickly and reopen development!
We've been in feature freeze since the 4.1-dev4 snapshot a week ago,
this continues throughout the beta stage with a focus on fixing bugs
so we can release 4.1 in early July.
4 years of development.
12,000 merged pull requests.
7,000 fixed issues.
1,500 individual contributors across engine and docs.
The Godot 4.0 release is by all metrics our biggest release so far.
No stone has been left unturned, all parts of the engine have been
modernized, refactored, overhauled, rewritten, redesigned.
Our work is far from done. Many areas still have significant known issues,
and will require focused work from all willing contributors to fix blocking
bugs, implement missing features, optimize for performance or compatibility,
and improve the user experience.
But Godot 4.0 marks the start of the new, modern Godot Engine, and a solid
foundation for us all to build upon. Future 4.x releases will come with a
much faster cadence, enabling us to iterate quickly on new features and
improvements to what we already provide.
To all of you who were involved in making Godot 4.0 what it is today, however
big or small your contributions were:
THANK YOU!
This was a massive undertaking, and you all participated in unique and
wonderful ways to build a free and open source game engine for everyone to
use and enjoy. You are breathtaking! <3
It's been 3 years since the release of Godot 3.2 and the start of the
major overhaul of the codebase for Godot 4.0.
And the work on that new version had started even 6 months before with
Juan working on the Vulkan renderer and various core changes in a
feature branch. This got merged in #36098 on Feb 11, 2020, oh well, we
3 days early ;)
Close to 15,000 pull requests have been merged for the 4.0 milestone,
which is half of the total amount of PRs in Godot's open source
lifetime. This is our biggest release by far, and it's finally time to
let it loose.
A huge thankyou to all the contributors who were involved over the
years, with contributions of any kind. Now's the final stretch to iron
out the remaining blocking bugs and release 4.0-stable.
At long last!
We're now pretty much feature complete (with a few exceptions which might
still make their way to future betas) and ready to move on to the consolidation
and bugfixing beta phase.
The API is more or less settled for 4.0, though we still reserve the right to
do changes if we see that it's really for the better - but from here on we'll
do our best to ensure that early adopters of 4.0 beta have an easy upgrade path
to future beta and eventually stable releases.
A million of thanks to all contributors who worked so hard on shaping Godot 4.0
over the past 3 years! Git counts nearly a thousand of you authoring close to
11,000 unique commits (excluding merge commits). You're all breathtaking! <3
This is _not_ yet a feature freeze, and the API should not be considered
stable. The alpha phase will have frequent official testing releases while
we focus on fixing known issues and integrating the remaining features and
API improvements planned for Godot 4.0.
This makes it possible to change the branch of the documentation that
URLs are pointing to without having to modify all class reference
files.
In the XML class reference, the `$DOCS_URL` placeholder should be used,
and will be replaced automatically in the editor and when generating
the RST class reference.
The documentation branch string is set in `version.py`.
Co-authored-by: Hugo Locurcio <hugo.locurcio@hugo.pro>
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
Congratulations to everyone in the Godot community for this awesome new
release, culmination of more than 10 months of development from close to
450 contributors!
Thanks to all involved, whether you contributed code, documentation,
bug reports, translations, community support or donations. You all
played a role in bringing better free and open source game development
tools to the world!
Godot 3.2 includes more than 6000 commits made since the 3.1 release in
March 2019, 3000 Pull Requests have been merged, and over 2000 issues
have been fixed!
This release builds upon the feature set and usability of Godot 3.1,
making it even more stable and powerful, and thus a very mature game
development tool for both 2D and 3D.
Now onwards to the 4.0 with Vulkan and a lot of modernization of the
codebase!
Unify pack file version and magic to avoid hardcoded literals.
`version.py` now always includes `patch` even for the first release in
a new stable branch (e.g. 3.2). The public name stays without the patch
number, but `Engine.get_version_info()` already included `patch == 0`,
and we can remove some extra handling of undefined `VERSION_PATCH` this
way.
Co-authored-by: Rémi Verschelde <rverschelde@gmail.com>
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
We're starting a new decade with a well-established, non-profit, free
and open source game engine, and tons of further improvements in the
pipeline from hundreds of contributors.
Godot will keep getting better, and we're looking forward to all the
games that the community will keep developing and releasing with it.
IMPORTANT: This means that the master branch is now considered feature-complete
for the upcoming 3.2 release, and thus in *feature freeze*.
Unless explicitly allowed by project maintainers, no new feature PRs will be
considered for merge until Godot 3.2-stable is released. Current PRs made
before the feature freeze will still be reviewed and potentially merged before
the beta stage, if deemed satisfactory.
Also include website URL and make it configurable via version.py
together with the rest of the engine branding.
Add mention to MIT license in --help output.
Congratulations to everyone in the Godot community for this awesome new
release, culmination of more than one year of development from close to
500 contributors!
Thanks to all involved, whether you contributed code, documentation,
bug reports, translations, community support or donations. You all
played a role in bringing better free and open source game development
tools to the world!
Godot 3.1 includes more than 7000 commits made since the 3.0 release in
January 2018, 3000 Pull Requests have been merged, and 3000 issues have
been fixed!
This release makes the 3.x branch more stable and powerful, and makes
it a very mature game development tool for both 2D and 3D.
Now feature development can restart towards 3.2 and 4.0!
If it needs to be hardcoded (for the sake of reproducible builds),
it should be together with the other hardcoded version info.
And yeah, two months in, let's move to 2019.
IMPORTANT: This means that the master branch is now considered feature-complete
for the upcoming 3.1 release, and thus in *feature freeze*.
Unless explicitly allowed by project maintainers, no new feature PRs will be
considered for merge until Godot 3.1-stable is released. Current PRs made
before the feature freeze will still be reviewed and potentially merged before
the beta stage, if deemed satisfactory.
Congratulations to everyone in the Godot community for the tremendous work
done on this release since 18 months, with hundreds of contributors pushing
almost 7500 commits with more than 3000 PRs and closing over 2000 issues
(and fixing even more than that, as many work-in-progress bugs were fixed
before an issue could be filled).
Godot 3.0 is definitely our biggest and boldest release so far, and we want
to thank the whole community for their unswerving support during this long
wait.
From there on, there is a lot of work to do to strengthen the foundations
that we built with 3.0, fixing the bugs that the many refactorings probably
introduced, optimizing new features and enhancing the usability again...
The 3.x era should be a fruitful one for Godot, and we hope that you will
continue using it to create awesome 2D and 3D games and increase the
notoriety of your favourite engine in the game development industry.
And now, let's all start waiting for 3.1...
*Feature freeze* means that from now on, no new features will be considered
for Godot 3.0, unless explicitely decided by core developers.
New pull requests implementing additional features will be automatically
set for the 3.1 milestone, and will only be considered for merging once the
3.0 version goes stable and the *master* branch reopens for feature
development.
Existing PRs made before the freeze will still be reviewed and potentially
be merged, if the features that they implement are deemed important enough
or don't risk to introduce issues.
Otherwise, PRs should now focus on:
- Fixing bugs
- Enhancing existing 3.0 features
WARNING: This branch is unstable and should not be used in
production for the time being.
See https://godotengine.org/article/warning-head-going-unstable
for more details.
To get the previous 2.2-alpha unreleased version, you can checkout
the '2.2' branch.
Yuri Sizov
Rémi Verschelde
Joost Heitbrink
Juan Linietsky