The team behind the game engine Godot has announced that Godot 4.1 is now ready for testing and has pushed out the first beta. It said that this release focuses on gradual changes that polish the user experience and make features from Godot 4.0 more stable.
While the main focus has been improving the UX, the project did confirm that contributors also managed to implement some new tools as well as “majorly rework” some of the existing features to make them more convenient. Among the changes is the ability to detach code editors so they can be moved to other monitors if you’re working in a multi-monitor environment.
This functionality was added by a contributor who worked on the feature as part of Google Summer of Code 2022. You are now able to detach bother the script editor and the shader editor from the main window and place them where you like.
With Godot 4.1 Beta 1, the team has also been building on the multi-threading support that came with Godot 4. This update addresses many multi-threading-related issues and brings significant improvements to threaded resource loading. Work has also begun on something called scene multi-threading but it’s still experimental and its use is not yet recommended - work will continue on this over Godot 4.2 and 4.3.
Finally, Godot 4.1 will not bring many of the rendering priorities that the project had outlined in April, work on these will resume for Godot 4.2. One of the improvements that did make it in Godot 4.1 is Vulkan pipeline caching - it said this is a step in the right direction to eliminating the pipeline compilation stuttering issue.
The final release of Godot 4.1 is due in July. If you want to test out the beta to find issues and report them, you’re encouraged to do so. The project recommends that you back up your projects before using Godot 4.1 so you can restore them if anything goes wrong. You can find the downloads here.