Release candidate: Godot 4.7.1 RC 1

Godot 4.7.1 RC 1 is the first release candidate for the 4.7.1 maintenance update, arriving just over a week after 4.7. The team says they’ve been splitting effort between early 4.8 development and hardening the current stable branch, but 4.7.1 has taken the lead because enough showstopper regressions were identified to justify an RC.

This build is mostly about fixing things that broke compared with earlier 4.x releases. The headline items include GUI crash fixes, touchscreen drag-and-drop behavior in the scene tree, GraphEdit connection line glitches, Android editor/runtime input issues, navigation agents re-entering avoidance simulation after pause/resume, and a TLS cookie cleanup bug. On the rendering side, there are fixes for flickering lighting on mesh instances with non-uniform scale, a transform caching issue that lingered for two frames after movement stopped, and shader variant payload reading errors.

For developers, the main value here is validation: if you’re shipping on 4.7, this RC is the time to smoke-test your project for regressions that may not show up in a clean demo. The Android soft-keyboard backspace fix and the editor instantiation issue are especially relevant for mobile workflows, while the rendering fixes matter if you rely on scaled instances or have seen odd temporal artifacts.

The release notes say 27 contributors landed 41 improvements, and the build is based on commit 17e2686e0. Godot is also explicitly asking for testing on the Web, XR, and Android editors, plus bug reports for any new regressions. As usual with RCs, the focus is on...