Defold 1.12.3 update

Defold just shipped version 1.12.3 on April 7, 2026, and the biggest changes are the kind that shave minutes off dozens of tiny tasks instead of adding one flashy headline feature. The stable release is live on GitHub, and the official release notes list new shader time access, texture transform semantics, editor scripting upgrades, and input-binding improvements. (github.com) (forum.defold.com) Defold is a free game engine for desktop, mobile, web, and console projects, so its users are often small teams that care more about fast iteration than giant cinematic pipelines. Its own download page pitches “nothing to set up or configure,” which makes workflow tweaks unusually important because the engine sells simplicity as part of the product. (defold.com) (github.com) One change exposes engine time directly to shaders, which are the tiny programs that tell the graphics card how to draw pixels on the screen. Before that, developers often had to push time values in manually; now animated effects like water ripples, pulsing lights, or heat shimmer can hook into built-in engine time instead. (forum.defold.com) Another change adds a semantic type for texture transforms, which is the data that tells an image how to slide, rotate, or scale before it is drawn. That gives shader authors a cleaner way to work with moving or remapped textures, which is useful for effects like scrolling backgrounds, animated decals, or distortion layers. (forum.defold.com) The editor also got better at showing code structure through outline-node parent support, which is the plumbing behind a more useful script structure sidebar. In plain terms, that is the difference between reading one long document and seeing a table of contents that lets you jump straight to the function you need. (forum.defold.com) Input setup got a smaller but very practical upgrade with a filterable key selector in input bindings. When a project has to support keyboard, controller, and platform-specific controls, a searchable list is a lot faster than hunting through a long menu for the one key or button you want. (forum.defold.com) There is also a new “Duplicate Selection” code action in the editor, plus new editor script interfaces like `editor.properties(node)`, a `text` property for textual resources, and an OpenAPI specification for the editor’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol server. Those are not player-facing features, but they make custom tooling and editor automation easier for teams that extend Defold instead of using it stock. (forum.defold.com) A few engine-side additions land in the same release, including quaternion conversion helpers in the Defold software development kit and support for atlas animations using an explicit frame list instead of just a start and end range. That second change matters when sprite frames are not stored in neat numeric order, because developers can now choose the exact sequence they want. (forum.defold.com) There is even experimental support for minifying internal resource paths to save memory, which is the kind of low-level change players never notice but developers do on constrained devices. Put together, version 1.12.3 looks less like a reinvention and more like a maintenance release aimed at making everyday Defold work a little less fiddly. (forum.defold.com)