The Godot 4.1 game engine is finally available to download after three beta and three release candidate releases. The point release includes four months of work and brings performance enhancements and improvements to the editor to make multi-monitor development easier.
In terms of performance updates, Godot 4.1 includes hashmap use for adding and removing child nodes several times faster, experimental multithreading for your scenes (not recommended for production), multithreading fixes for issues and limitations, and pipeline caching for the Vulkan renderer which lessens stuttering.
Godot 4.1 also brings better multi-monitor support for the editor as you can now detach docs into floating windows and detach script editors, such as the shader editor, and put them on a different monitor. Furthermore, the update also enables the editor to keep track of your window layout so you can start where you left off the next time you open the program.
While there are plenty of improvements in Godot 4.1, the team did manage to grumble when it came to platform support. It said it supports exporting to all desktop platforms with the standard and .NET version of the engine and to mobile and web if you don’t use C#.
Unfortunately, web exports are subject to limitations due to poor support from browser makers including Google and Apple. For example, Chrome on macOS has bad WebGL 2 support which can’t be addressed unless Google fixes the issue or a significant amount of work goes into a dedicated WebGL 1 / GLES2 renderer.
The Godot team said there’s also an issue on hosting platforms that don’t let you set the required CORS headers for SharedArrayBuffer support because Safari doesn’t implement coep:credentialless header support. It said there is no issue in Firefox or Chromium-based browsers though. In this case, the team is researching a workaround which could fix the issue without Apple’s intervention.
You can download this latest update from the Godot website.