Godot 4.7: Everything New (VirtualJoystick, AreaLight3D, HDR, and More)

Godot 4.7 is the first release in a while where the headline features change what you can ship, not just how the editor feels. A built-in mobile joystick. Real area lights in 3D. True HDR output on the desktop. And the first plumbing for hardware ray tracing.

I walked through the whole thing in a video if you'd rather watch than read: Godot 4.7: Everything New. This post is the written companion, with the parts that actually matter for the kind of games most people here are building.

Quick status note: 4.7 hit feature freeze in late April 2026 and went through several release candidates through June. By the time you read this it's either stable or a few days away, so it's safe to start learning the new nodes.

For years, putting a thumbstick on a touchscreen meant grabbing a community addon or building one from scratch. Godot 4.7 ships a VirtualJoystick node in the box. It's based on the addon a lot of people already used, so it arrives mature instead of half-baked.

You get three modes:

• Fixed: the stick stays where you put it. Classic dead-zone setup.
• Dynamic: the stick jumps to wherever the player first touches, inside its area, then snaps back on release.
• Following: same as dynamic, but the stick chases the thumb if it drifts past the edge.

You read its direction as a Vector2 and feed that straight into your movement code. I wrote a full walkthrough here: Godot 4.7 VirtualJoystick tutorial.

Until now, faking a soft light source (a window, a glowing panel, a strip light) meant clusters of omni lights and a lot of fiddling. AreaLight3D is one node with a width and a height that emits light from across that whole rectangle. Soft shadows and distance falloff come out right by default.

Interior lighting setups that used to eat an afternoon now take a couple of minutes. Full tutorial: Godot 4.7 AreaLight3D.

Godot can now drive HDR monitors directly on Windows, macOS, Linux (through Wayland), and BSD. Bloom, emissive materials, and bright skies land on the panel the way the renderer actually intended instead of getting clamped to standard range.

If you've ever made a neon sign or a sunset and thought it looked flat on a nice display, this is the fix. It's an output feature, so you turn it on in your project settings rather than rewriting shaders.

The old way to generate a texture at runtime was to render a SubViewport and grab its image. It worked, but it was clumsy for something as simple as "draw a circle here." DrawableTexture gives you an actual texture you can draw onto directly, no viewport gymnastics.

Think minimaps, fog of war, paint and decals, or in-game level editors. More on the use cases here: Godot 4.7 DrawableTexture.

This one comes with an asterisk. Godot 4.7 adds the low-level Vulkan plumbing for ray tracing: the hooks to build acceleration structures and trace rays. That's the foundation a future renderer feature gets built on.

What it is not, yet, is a switch you flip to get ray-traced reflections in your game. If a video or thread made it sound like 4.7 ships ray tracing you can use today, that's the part to be clear-eyed about. The exciting stuff is coming. This release is the scaffolding.

None of these will headline a release video, but a few of them you'll feel every day:

• Inspector copy and paste for whole property sections at once, not one field at a time.
• Nearest-neighbor scaling for 3D viewports, so low-res and pixel-art 3D stays crisp instead of blurry.
• Shader preview in the text editor, so you can see a shader's result while you type it.
• Monospaced fonts for methods, properties, and signals in the inspector, which makes code-y values far easier to scan.
• Collapsible animation track groups for taming a busy AnimationPlayer.
• Path3D collider snapping and a Scene Paint tool with grid snapping in the 3D editor.
• A reworked Asset Store with saner license filtering and sorting.

If you're mid-project, the usual rule holds: finish your current milestone, back up, then upgrade on a branch and test. Godot point releases are careful about compatibility, but "test before you commit" is never wrong.

If you're starting something new, start on 4.7. The VirtualJoystick alone is worth it for anything headed to mobile, and you may as well learn the current nodes instead of patterns you'll have to unlearn.

And if you're still learning the engine itself, new features aren't the thing holding you back. Knowing how to wire a real system together is. That's the whole idea behind our free Inventory System quest: you build a complete, working system instead of collecting scattered clips. New engine version, same advice. Build something end to end.

When does Godot 4.7 release?

Godot 4.7 reached feature freeze in late April 2026 and moved through beta and several release candidates into June 2026, with the stable build landing right around the end of June. The dev and beta builds have been public the whole time, so you can already try every feature in this post.

Is the VirtualJoystick really built in now?

Yes. VirtualJoystick is a real node in 4.7, no addon required. It supports fixed, dynamic, and following modes, and you read its direction as a Vector2 to drive movement. See the VirtualJoystick tutorial for setup.

Can I use ray tracing in Godot 4.7?

Not as a finished feature. 4.7 adds the underlying Vulkan ray tracing plumbing, which is the technical foundation for future work. There's no ready-made ray-traced reflection or global illumination toggle in this release.

Should I upgrade an existing project to 4.7?

Finish your current milestone first, then upgrade on a separate branch and test before merging. Point releases keep good backward compatibility, but testing on a copy is the safe move for any engine update.