This is a post I've wanted to wrote some time ago, mostly for those who still hesitate to go on the "full of dangers" beta path.
These past weeks, I've used mostly beta releases from 9 to 17, then RC now working on some tutorials especially the Match3 game video series on youtube from Mister Taft Create (he looks to be as messy as I am sometimes 🙂 ), the little 2D game puzzle by Emi and one personal project (a clone of Ishid-O-Matic for Amiga back in 1992).
Except a few concerns and issues from time to time, I've experienced some unreproductible one-time crashes (one was importing FBX files, another was importing about a dozens of font files at once).
The main issue I had an still have is the very big gap between 3 and 4, there was the Tweens which are no longer a node now, pretty "easy" to fix, but the removal/displacement of margins for all containers (HBox and VBox) is quite annoying, the migration document contains a reference to some "offset", the only one I found was pivot offset in transform group properties.
On the Match3 Goal video, I encounter a weird issue as design shows good result in the editor but doesn't look the same at all in the game (item inside container has its own height).
In some cases, when waking up computer after putting it to sleep when Godot editor is still opened, there are an infinite (? cannot be sure of that) loop of messages in console and editor is frozen/unresponsive to input.
ERROR: Vulkan: Did not create swapchain successfully. at: (drivers/vulkan/vulkan_context.cpp:2222) (an issue already exists)
Another issue (since January 24th at least) after maybe iconifying editor, it freeze for many seconds for any modification of a node's property ! one freeze per change, including adding x characters in a label (no msg in console), Computer resources usage are not high at all (closer to 0) but there is a spike in CPU usage when it's happen. It's happen randomly.
Finally Animation have also their own problems as it doesn't looks very intuitive to copy an animation from one AnimationPlayer node of a scene to another in another scene. There is the library thing which doesn't looks like to be shared between scenes. At least on a new scene, with a brand new AP node, when loading a library, there is no file displayed despite there are some in another library of another AP nodes of another scene.
So except that, there are just a few changes for export/onready variables, some name has been modified like PoolVectorXArray.
I did not recommend to convert an old project to Godot 4, official demos are a good example of this, many are broken, and maybe not by accident, for instance the platformer2D demo is quite messy and it should be rewrite from scratch. On the other hand, starting a new project may be ok depending of the needs (physics for FPS games might not be a good idea yet). Even video tutorials are not so difficult to adapt, we just have to find where the properties have been moved, their new names, etc.
What about your own experience with the beta ?
