Godot 3.1 just became one step closer with the first Beta release, after several prior alpha releases. Details of the beta release from the Godot blog:
After an alpha phase that took longer than anticipated, we’re now ready to enter the beta phase for Godot 3.1, which means that the feature work is finished for this version. From now on, we are in release freeze, which means that new features will no longer be merged, and we will focus solely on fixing release-critical bugs.
This should allow to finish polishing this release quickly and hopefully be ready to publish it by the end of this month. See this GitHub issue for details.
Contrarily to our 3.0.x maintenance releases, which include only thoroughly reviewed and backwards-compatible bug fixes, the 3.1 version includes all the new features (and subsequent bugs!) merged in the master branch since January 2018, and especially all those showcased on our past devblogs. It’s been almost a year since the 3.0 release and close to 6,000 commits, so expect a lot of nice things in the final 3.1 version!
While there are no formal release notes available yet, the following change log tracks the majority of changes in the 3.1 release. Highlights of this release include:
- OpenGL ES 2 support returns (alongside ES3 support)
- Visual Shader Editor improvements (video)
- CSG support (video)
- 2D and 3D physics improvements, including Softbody and Ragdoll systems
- 2D mesh and skeletal deformation (video)
- KinematicBody2D improvements
- Optional static type support (video)
- 2D Animation improvements (video)
- 3D Animation improvements (video)
- much, much more
The 3.1 beta release downloads are not available on the primary download page and can only be downloaded here for GDScript only builds and here for Mono/C# builds.