After 11 quick beta releases, Godot 3.1 became one step closer to reality with the release of Godot 3.1 release candidate 1. The release candidate is not meant for production work, but is instead intended to iron out last minute bugs before the full release.
Details of the release from the Godot blog:
After over one year of work, 5 alpha releases, 11 betas and 7000 commits by close to 500 contributors, we’re finally ready to wrap up the 3.1 version and let you all benefit from the hundreds of new features, enhancements and bug fixes that have been worked on by the community since January 2018.
We’re therefore publishing this first release candidate, Godot 3.1 RC 1, to let all of you test it thoroughly and check if any showstoppers remain. We might have several RC builds if need be while the last blockers get fixed, until we get one RC build that we consider ready to ship. After the two-month beta phase that we had with 11 releases and hundreds of bug fixes, the path to the stable release should be quite short.
Downloads of the release candidate are in a separate location from the mainline builds and are available here for GDScript only or here for Mono/C# builds. There are a ton of new features coming in 3.1 as you can see from this in-progress release notes.
We have covered development versions of several of these new features already, including:
- Static typed GDScript
- Animation Improvements
- UI Improvements
- Skeletal Deformation
- Visual Shader Editor
- CSG Support
We will revisit the final form of these improvements when Godot 3.1 is released. If you are interested in learning Godot, we’ve got you covered with this complete game step by step tutorial as well as our comprehensive Godot 3 video series.