| Godot 4.5 Adds Stencil Buffer |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Tuesday, 16 September 2025 | |||
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Godot 4.5 has been released with additions including a stencil buffer, screen reader support, script backtracing and custom loggers. Godot is an open-source, cross-platform game engine that is increasingly popular as a rival to commercial alternatives. It was made available under open source in 2014, and since then has added features to become a strong choice, for both 2D and 3D game development. It includes the GDScript language which is syntactically similar to Python and optimized for Godot's scene-based architecture. It also supports programming in C# and in C and C++ using its GDExtension.
The most recent version, Godot 4.5, adds support for stencil buffers. The developers say you can imagine this as an invisible sphere that surrounds your character. "Even if geometry is not rendering itself on screen, we insert its shape into the stencil buffer. Then, we make our wall shaders only render if the target pixel is not covered by the stencil." More technically, a stencil buffer can be written to by meshes for later comparison. It is similar to the existing depth buffer. Script backtracing has also been added to this release. The feature can be used to see exactly where a problem occurred in your code. Custom logger support has also been added. Custom loggers can be used to intercept log messages and errors. A shader baker is another addition. This speeds up compilation by scanning resources and scenes for shaders, then pre-compiles the shader to the right format used by the driver on the target platform. Shaders are small programs for your GPU that draw the current scene and the have to be compiled. Pre-compiling the shaders reduces the wait times on the final compilation. The developers say that when targeting Apple and Windows devices, using Metal and D3D12 respectively, they saw a 20× decrease in load times for their TPS demo. The new release also adds support for SMAA anti-aliasing to improve rendering by making edges less jagged. SMAA, Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing, is an advanced anti-aliasing technique that smooths out jagged lines and textures on screen. Support for WASM SIMD has also been added. WebAssembly Single Instruction, Multiple Data is a technology that permits CPUs to do some parallel computation, often speeding up the whole program. The developers say it provides a useful performance improvement if you're writing web-based games. Other additions include HiDPI improvements for icons and Native Wayland sub-window support. Godot 4.5 is available now.
More InformationRelated ArticlesGodot 4.1 Improves Performance Godot 3.5 Adds New Navigation Server To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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