Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 Game Engine Released With Some Nice Improvements

Godot 4.0 continues working its way towards release as the most acclaimed open-source game engine. Godot 4.0 brings Vulkan rendering, OpenXR support, and a ton of other features covered in the past few years for making it more competitive with commercial game engines. Out this morning is Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 with a few more improvements worth noting.

Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 is another unstable release in the road to Godot 4 and still may see breaking changes before the Godot 4.0 Beta releases begin.

With Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 one of the headline features is text-to-speech support for all platforms. This text-to-speech support across Linux / macOS / HTML5 / Windows / iOS / Android is using Speech Dispatcher as a device independent layer for speech synthesis.

Also useful with Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 is reading/storing of joypad events is now done in a separate thread on Linux. This separate thread handling for joypad events is done to avoid possibly missed events that have been experienced when stuck to the main input thread.

On the rendering front, Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 has a lot of code refactoring and continues work-in-progress code on OpenGL 3.x rendering support. The GL3 rendering support isn't yet usable but is an alternative to the Vulkan API usage and OpenGL ES.

Downloads and more details on Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 via GodotEngine.org.