After six months of waiting working from the release of 4.4, the new minor version of the Godot Engine is finally here!

Highlights

Like always, a new Godot version brings new features, improvements, and bug fixes thanks to the work of many incredible contributors (which did surpass the 3000 number in this release) between volunteers, people working for third-party companies, and people hired by the Godot Foundation.

With over 2000 commits, it’s impossible to cover everything here. You can check the whole list using the interactive changelog. I’ll list here a few of the more interesting points:

• Support for stencil buffers (PR), allowing for many interesting effects, such as portals.
• Generate script backtraces, even in release builds (PR), which allow game developers to log issues when they are detected. It’s a great help to investigate logs provided by players since they can have more specific information about the failure.
• Live preview for localization (PR), a feature that let you see how the scene will look like in different languages, without leaving the editor.
  • In a similar vein you can also now change the editor language without restarting it (PR).
• Support for screen readers (PR), allowing for games and editor to be better used by visually impaired people and others who require reading assistance. A great plus for accessibility.
• Chunk tilemap physics (PR), a new system that merge together tilemap cells into bigger collision shapes, greatly improving performance.
• Improvement in the build profile generator (PRs), an underrated feature that allows you to generate a build profile that can be used to compile a stripped version of Godot with only the things that you use. This enhancement makes the detection of usage much better.
• GDScript features such as variadic functions (PR) and abstract classes and methods (PRs).

The list goes on and and on. You can see these and more highlights in the release page. You can download Godot 4.5 already and if you like it don’t forget to make a donation.