Apple has pledged visionOS support for Godot
Apple is continuing its push to bring more games to its platforms, with the latest involving an offer to add visionOS support to the Godot game engine.
Apple has been gradually making more of an effort to encourage developers to make their games available on macOS and its ecosystem as a whole. Now, it seems that it’s trying to get more gaming content for the Apple Vision Pro.
A pull request on the Github page for Godot, a free and open-source game engine, has Apple making an offer to help the engine work on Apple Vision Pro. The request, by Ricardo Sanchez-Saez of the visionOS engineering team, states that Apple wants to contribute Vision Pro support to the Godot engine.
According to the post, the goals of the contribution are to support current Godot games to run natively within a window on visionOS. A visionOS VR plugin for Godot is also expected, which will make it easier to create immersive experiences for the headset.
So far, the team has managed to create a way to compile and link Swift files with Godot, and has a working version of the Vision Pro VR plugin. However, it is still working to add visionOS as a platform to Godot, and is doing so by reusing code for the existing iOS support.
A bigger gaming bet
Offering to incorporate Vision Pro support into Godot offers Apple a few good benefits. For a start, the initiative could encourage developers to use Godot, an established engine, to create more content for the Apple Vision Pro itself.
The Apple Vision Pro isn’t a massive gaming device, unlike other VR headsets available to consumers. That equates to relatively few immersive games for the Apple Vision Pro versus its competition, such as the Meta Quest headset lineup.
It is also certainly an expansion of its current initiatives to increase gaming on its platforms. Aside from courting high-tier game developers to bring AAA titles to Mac, projects like the Game Porting Toolkit have also helped developers see what their games could look like running on Mac hardware.
Building for Godot
The decision for Apple to bring Vision Pro support to Godot may seem a bit unusual, but it’s one that does make sense. At least, if you consider the current game development landscape.
The two main game engines used for development are Unreal Engine and Unity, but Godot is growing in popularity. As a free game engine, it does away with any need for developers to pay licenses to Epic or Unity to use the engines commercially.
The open-source nature also makes it easier for people to contribute to the project as a whole, or to add their own code to customize it for their own creations.
Apple may also find Godot as needing assistance in developing the visionOS support, since it isn’t being worked on by a commercial entity. Epic and Unity both have teams of developers working on mixed reality tech for their engines in a paid capacity, while Godot relies on volunteer efforts.
While Godot is getting popular with developers, especially cash-strapped indies and hobbyists, it has yet to really be used for a major release. So far, it has enjoyed successes with games like Buckshot Roulette and Cassette Beasts, but even these are moderate and far from the revenues of mainstream titles.
Apple’s visionOS support also won’t be a first for Godot. It already has a Meta toolkit so the engine can be used to produce XR games for the company’s headsets.
