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Godot 4.4 beta 1 released

"The Godot Foundation [just announced the availability of the first Godot 4.4 beta](https:\/\/godotengine.org\/article\/dev-snapshot-godot-4-4-beta-1\/#new-in-beta-1)! This officially marks the start of feature freeze for 4.4, meaning contributors are encouraged to focus their efforts on fixing regressions and other outstanding bugs.\r\n\r\nAfter all the 7 previous development releases you would be excused for thinking the beta 1 release was just a release tying it all up together, but then you would be absolutely wrong - this release is **packed** with new stuff as well:\r\n> Normally our Beta 1 release notes summarize all the most exciting changes from the previous dev releases. But the team managed to merge an unusually large number of exciting PRs right before the beta this time around\r\n\r\n![](\/files\/6f1b205f-9c29-4c17-b107-d1db0e6df334)\r\n\r\n## Highlights\r\nFrom the release announcement, here are a few highlights:\r\n* **Game window embedding:** easily run your game, override the game camera, and select objects in game, all from the editor!\r\n* Apple Game Controller improvements\r\n* **2D shader instance uniforms:** Shader instance uniforms allow you to assign a different value to the uniform for each CanvasItem that uses it. Importantly, this works without breaking batching, so it can be used as a performant way to add unique effects to CanvasItems without having to juggle materials.\r\n* Visualization of 3D particle emission shapes\r\n* Support for MetalFX upscaling on macOS and iOS\r\n* Support for AgX tone mapping\r\n* **Transparency support for LightmapGI:** Currently when baking lightmaps users have to choose between transparent objects casting shadows as if they were fully opaque, or not casting shadows at all. 4.4 adds support for baking with transparent objects, including having tinted shadows (something that dynamic shadows don\u2019t support yet)\r\n* **@tool script buttons:** You can now create buttons in the inspector seamlessly using the new @export_tool_button annotation in @tool scripts\r\n* Camera support for the Linux platform, allowing developers to access connected cameras from within their game. \r\n\r\n## Rendering and shaders\r\nMany monumental rendering changes were finished towards the end of the 4.3 dev cycle slightly too late to be included in 4.3. As a result, 4.4 contains a massive amount of exciting features!\r\n\r\nThe Ubershader system has been improved - this is a system that allows the engine to compile a flexible, but slow version of shaders at load time which can be used as a fallback while the optimized shaders compile in the background. The technique allows users to ship games without shader stutter and without resorting to manually displaying every possible material and object combination behind a loading screen.\r\n\r\nAnother long awaited improvement is shadow caster masks. This allow users to apply a mask on Light3Ds to select what rendering layers will be considered when casting shadows. Previously, it was only possible to disable shadows from a GeometryInstance (for all Light3Ds) or a Light3D (for all GeometryInstances). This allows much more fine-grained control that allows users to further optimize dynamic lights and control where shadows appear in their games.\r\n\r\nThere are also improvements in physics interpolation with support added for 3D objects (include Multimesh!). Physics interpolation is a technique that allows you to run your physics update at a very low FPS while maintaining smooth movement. This allows you to both save CPU overhead and make your game look much smoother:\r\n[ video:physics interpolation](https:\/\/godotengine.org\/storage\/blog\/dev-snapshot-godot-4-4-dev-1\/physics-interpolation.mp4?1)\r\n\r\n## Download\r\n140 contributors submitted 406 improvements for this release - in addition to all the contributors that submitted improvements to the development releases. If you've waited to check out the 4.4 version during the development milestone releases, now is your time to jump in and give it a whirl!\r\n\r\n!!! warning Beta releases\r\nRemember that this is a beta release, and as such may contain breaking changes, and can cause irreversible data loss in your project. Always back up your project files (for example using a version control system) before trying out beta releases!\r\n!!!\r\n\r\nYou can download Godot 4.4 beta 1 from the release announcement page:\r\nhttps:\/\/godotengine.org\/article\/dev-snapshot-godot-4-4-beta-1\/#downloads\r\n\r\n"

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