Apple Wants to Help Bring Vision Pro Support to Godot Game Engine
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Apple engineers are offering to bring Vision Pro support to the free, open-source Godot game engine. Godot is a popular engine that offers game developers an alternative to the competing Unreal and Unity game engines.
Godot is cross-platform, supporting mobile devices, computers, the web, and more. However, the engine doesn’t currently support running games developed using Godot on the Apple Vision Pro. Now, Apple’s visionOS engineering team is offering to contribute Vision Pro support, allowing Godot games to run natively on the headset, reports MacRumors.
On GitHub, Ricardo Sanchez-Saez, a member of the visionOS engineering team, has stated that Apple wants to contribute by developing a visionOS VR plugin. Apple engineers are already contributing to the project and will continue development after receiving community feedback and suggestions. Apple is asking the developer community to provide guidance or to help test functionality.
Dear Godot community,
I’m on Apple’s visionOS engineering team, and we would like to contribute Vision Pro support to the Godot engine. This is the first PR that lays the foundation for that.
First, I’d like to mention that we’re really excited to be working with the Godot community on adding visionOS support. We’ve attempted to follow Godot’s coding standards and a high-quality bar for our contributions. We hope that our contributions align with Godot’s goals. Lastly, even though we have tried to split the changes into smaller self-contained PRs, we acknowledge that some of these PRs can be of considerable size.
We’re very happy to iterate on our PRs after receiving feedback and suggestions from the community.
The engineer says that the immediate goals of their contributions are to provide support for current Godot games running natively on a planar window on visionOS and to “support creating Immersive experiences by using a new Godot’s visionOS VR Plugin.”
The Apple Vision Pro’s sales have been less than spectacular so far, and the headset is facing waning interest from current and potential Apple users due to the device’s high price and a lack of content designed for the headset.
By providing free tools that would make it easier for Godot developers to create immersive versions of their Godot games, Apple could spark new interest and drive more sales of the headset.
Reigniting interest in the Vision Pro is especially important for the future, as Apple is currently working on new versions of the headset, which reportedly include a lower-priced “Vision Air” that could allow it to compete with other AR/VR headsets, like Meta’s Quest 3, which boasts a much lower price tag than the Vision Pro. Apple has also joined forces with Sony to add support for PlayStation VR2 controllers.
Apple has been working to bring high-end gaming to its devices, wooing AAA-tier game developers to bring their titles to the Mac platform. Apple’s projects like the Game Porting Toolkit have aided developers by allowing them to see what their AAA games could look like running on Mac hardware.
Apple has also worked to bring AAA titles to the iPhone and iPad, with full console versions of Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage coming to the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and higher-end iPad models.
