Godot 4.7 arrived in June, bringing us a new Asset Store, HDR output support, a dedicated node for rectangular light sources, and numerous other improvements. As always, the Godot team hasn't slowed down, continuing its work on the engine's next major release and building on the momentum the project has gained in recent years.

We're now at the fourth development snapshot of Godot 4.8, and the key areas of focus for the release are beginning to take shape. The blog post addresses the impression that Godot 4.8 might be primarily focused on stability and bug fixes compared with previous releases, however, that assumption "couldn't be further from the truth."

The 3D trail node has been one of the most requested features for years. With Trail3D, you won't need to worry about how meshes are drawn and how UVs are assigned, just set it up and get the effect you want:

There's also a new solution that adds node groups to the visual shader, so you can now keep things much cleaner and easier to understand, bundle commonly used parts of a shader into a group, and reuse them wherever you need. Here's an example of Visual Shader node groups in action:

Rendering continues to get plenty of love, with this snapshot adding multi-bounce ambient occlusion. Previously, Godot's ambient occlusion didn't account for light bouncing between surfaces, which could make scenes look darker than they should. This new approach provides a low-cost approximation of those light bounces, making scenes look more natural.

The technique is based on a method presented at SIGGRAPH in 2016. See the difference with multi-bounce ambient occlusion approximation turned off and on:

Another notable addition is directional lightmap specular lighting. It fixes an issue where static baked directional lights used with a directional LightmapGI wouldn't include any specular information in the bake. With this change, that specular lighting can now be baked into the LightmapGI, giving results much closer to real-time directional lighting.

For those interested in the technical details, the developers recommend checking out this GDC presentation from 2018. Below is a showcase of directional lightmap specular lighting with the feature disabled and enabled:

Godot 4.8 has much more coming, with 86 contributors already submitting 224 fixes and improvements for this release. You can check out the full list of changes included in Godot 4.8 compared to the previous 4.7 release. As always, you're encouraged to test Godot 4.8 and report any issues on GitHub.

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