Godot 4.2 Released: Taking The Open-Source Game Engine Up a Notch

Godot, the community favorite alternative to proprietary game engines such as Unreal and Unity, has a new major update!

Godot 4.2 has “arrived in style” with loads of updates across the board. It continues in the path that the Godot 4.0 release paved, and builds upon it.

Grab a beverage of your choice, as I highlight the good things about this release ☕

Suggested Read 📖

Godot 4.2: What's New?

There are plenty of new things with the Godot 4.2 release. But, we will focus on the key highlights:

Official ARM Support on Linux
Editor Improvements
More Version Control Friendly
Enhanced Tilemaps
Improvements to Multiplayer/Networking
Better Navigation System

Official ARM Support on Linux

Even though it was possible to manually build Godot for ARM-based devices on Linux, there was never an official ARM build for Linux.

However, that has now changed with the Godot 4.2 release. They have provided both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Godot for ARM on their downloads page.

Keep in mind that this is an experimental undertaking, so expect bugs and issues.

Editor Improvements

a screenshot of godot 4.2 code region feature

There have been many improvements on the editor side of Godot.

As illustrated by the screenshot above, the first one is a new addition to the code editor called “Code Region”. It allows you to break up scripts into named blocks, which can then be minimized to lessen clutter.

a screenshot of godot 4.2 box shape editing

Another new addition to Godot is the ability to extend each side of box shapes individually within the editor viewport. Previously, this was only limited to the center point and symmetrical extents.

a screenshot of godot 4.2 project manager

The project manager also sees an update, the general project import workflow has been improved alongside a rearrangement of buttons.

More Version Control Friendly

Godot 4.2 comes with a fix to an issue where changing scenes or renaming nodes during 'ready' would lead to crashes, various issues related to renaming/moving files were also fixed.

The developers also added:

Also, some cases of sporadic changing of resource IDs in scenes have been solved (GH-65011). There is still room for improvement, but this already makes 4.2 way more version control friendly.

Enhanced Tilemaps

a screenshot of godot 4.2 tile rotation feature

Alongside major performance optimizations to the tile/tilemap system of Godot, there is a new feature that allows you to rotate or flip a tile/tile pattern while placing them anywhere.

Improvements to Multiplayer/Networking

This release also features improvements for the high-level multiplayer system; the 'MultiplayerSynchronizer' node now supports syncing of transform components, sub-resource properties, and other types of indexed data.

There is also a security fix for a denial-of-service vulnerability that was previously disclosed with the Godot 4.0.4 RC1 release.

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The developers recommend that users upgrade to Godot 4.0.4, 4.1.2, or 4.2 to avoid issues.

a screenshot of godot 4.2 navigation mesh baking for 2d feature

Godot 4.2 brings about navigation mesh baking for 2D, it can handle physics bodies, mesh instances, plain polygons and more.

Furthermore, support for multi-threading was added for 2D and 3D navigation mesh baking for improving performance, and reducing stutters.

🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements

There are plenty of other changes worth noting:

Improvements to the GDExtension system.
Support for AMD's FSR 2.2 tech.
A major rework of the graph-building nodes.
Native file selection dialog for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
It is now possible to specify a different install folder for add-ons and assets.
A fix for the Steam Input issue that caused some gamepad events to be handled twice.

For more details on this release, you can through the official release notes.