Feature freeze for Godot 4.8 brings project-wide symbol renaming and edits inside the running game

Godot 4.8 dev 7, released on 29 September, is the last snapshot to add features before beta. It brings experimental symbol renaming, live CanvasItem editing, animated decals and AccessKit on iOS an...

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Godot 4.8 has reached feature freeze. The seventh development snapshot, published on the Godot blog on 29 September by Thaddeus Crews, is the last one that adds features: from here the team says it will work only on bug fixes and regressions before the move to beta. No beta date is given. As of 12 October, dev 7 is still the newest 4.8 build on the blog and in the godot-builds releases on GitHub.

The post says 80 contributors submitted 182 fixes since dev 6, and several long-requested features landed just before the cut-off.

Renaming and editing a running game

Symbol renaming, from Tomasz Chabora in GH-117949, renames a symbol across the whole project. The post shows it telling a class name apart from the same word in a comment and in a string, and keeping same-named local variables in different methods separate. It arrived so late that it is marked experimental and needs to be switched on by hand for now.

Michael Alexsander's GH-122510 lets developers move, resize, rotate and scale CanvasItems, and change their pivot, inside the running Game view, with its own toolbar and full undo and redo through the editor. Double-clicking something in the game now opens its scene, as it does in the editor.

Decals, physics, touch and accessibility

Colin O'Rourke's GH-115653 makes decals fully animatable. For physics, GH-113970 by aterray, with Ricardo Buring and Mikael Hermansson, adds query methods for PhysicsDirectSpaceState2D and 3D that fill a reusable, strongly typed result object instead of building a new dictionary on every call.

Anish Kumar added native touch support to TabBar and PopupMenu. Hugo Locurcio's GH-111455 adds an "audio" theme item, so UI elements can play sounds on common events through the theme system; custom controls cannot use it yet, which GH-123867 is due to fix. AccessKit, the library behind Godot's screen reader support on desktop since 4.5, now reaches iOS through first-time contributor Ben Humphries and Android through maintainer bruvzg. The post notes the iOS version does not yet handle editable text fields.

Two things to check before testing. The .NET build now needs .NET 10 or newer, up from .NET 8. And the known issues list says Steam Deck built-in controls no longer work in Linux exports (GH-123704); switching from Gaming Mode to Desktop Mode works around it. As with every snapshot, the team asks testers to keep backups or use version control.

Sources

• Dev snapshot: Godot 4.8 dev 7 (Godot Engine)
• godotengine/godot-builds release 4.8-dev7 (GitHub)

Image: Godot Engine / FLEB