Godot 4.5 beta 1 brings Wayland improvements, shader baking, rendering improvements

Godot 4.5 is going to be an excellent release of the free, open source and cross-platform game engine with a first Beta needing testing. Easily my favourite game engine, with so much effort put in to bring major advancements for game devs.

For platforms there's much improved Wayland support on Linux with sub-windows now hooked up. They still need to finish in-editor game window embedding, and then Wayland and X11 will have feature parity. On Windows developers can now edit the metadata of binaries without resorting to a third-party tool. So devs can set the icon, product name and so on out of the box. Nice. On macOS, embedding the game window is now supported too.

Pictured - Godot 4.5, testing the third-person shooter demo

One major addition is support for stencil shaders, which has been nearly two years in the making. The developers say it will "allow our users to perform entirely new techniques with the power of depth". They've also added in new rendering improvements including ambient specular occlusion, SMAA and bent normal maps. Future Godot games are going to look a lot prettier.

Shader baking also sounds like a good addition. Giving developers the option to bake shaders at project export time, resulting in faster loading times for games.

There's loads more to it like improved accessibility with the integration of AccessKit, providing screenreader support. There's various other UI improvements too.

In Beta 2 they should also be moving over to SDL 3 as Godot's gamepad input driver, instead of continuing to roll their own which has an increasing amount of issues. Quite a big change overall, so they've made a feature freeze exception to have that pulled in for the next Beta release. Exciting!

See more in the release post.