13 ms·

Native visionOS platform support

374 points by whalee 1y ago

andsoitis 1y ago
Shiny. Unsolicited advice. visionOS is a distraction for the Godot team (whether or not you believe visionOS is a dead end or not). I would recommend focusing on high impact domains while Godot competitors like Unreal and Unity diffuse their attention. If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
- deleted 1y ago
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- solardev 1y ago
  That's one of the things they are discussing in the comment chain. Apple hasn't directly addressed it yet. Seems like if they want this to be official, they ought to donate some headsets and money to offset the increased maintenance...
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Apple has more to gain than does Godot. Money and headsets cannot faithfully account for additional complexity and coordination tax. Nevermind potential constraints on other platform expressions of the game engine. What you want to do is first decide whether it is strategically valuable to be on this platform. If it is important, then you want to make sure there’s ROI in approach. Doing things in reverse, I.e. seeing whether there’s a cost-effective path to support another platform before deciding whether to support is is misguided in my opinion. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  It looks like Apple put their own people on this one. If they want to maintain this, the Godot foundation needs to be extremely clear about that. You're talking about an extremely niche platform that will require tons of ongoing maintenance. I would have hoped Apple also spent time working on the general engine and maybe tackling some bugs. Maybe they did maybe they didn't.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Even debating support for a niche platform is a distraction. Noise.
    - dewey 1y ago
      Niche platform from one of the biggest companies on the planet isn’t as niche as others though. If there’s a way to get first party support from the vendor directly it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        > it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS). In what way? As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven. If true, Godot has nothing to gain. Apple is struggling with adoption so they have most to gain from Godot support for visionOS, but is not obvious that visionOS support would benefit Godot in any strategic manner. One strategic heuristic is that you don’t want to undertake the work to enable another company’s success on a product line, unless you depend on it or believe you have a strategic advantage against other competitors. For example, if Godot negotiates for exclusivity or primary status for game engine positioning on visionOS and they believe VR is a material future footprint, that might be interesting. Anything less is in Apple’s favor and not in Godot’s.
        dewey 1y ago
        I'll leave this decision to the Godot maintainers but as an outside that only read the PR and comments it seems plausible that it's also in Apples favor to fix issues in the shared iOS / visionOS codebase that they are using, especially if they might come from Apple APIs that could be improved on their side too.
        spencerflem 1y ago
        exclusivity ?? its an open source project why would they want that, its not a competition :p
etchalon 1y ago
Good on Apple.
waynecochran 1y ago
Are there any apps from this project available in the visionos App Store yet?
- saagarjha 1y ago
  My guy it's not even merged yet
  - ugh123 1y ago
    Godot is open source. I'm sure, at least internally, Apple has tested these changes on one or more 'demo' apps. Any of which could be released as public demos.
    - klausa 1y ago
      Yes, Apple is a company that is famously known for publicly releasing demos and proofs of concepts; especially around games.
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      If only had some sort of developer conference coming up in a little over a month. A conference where they release a bunch of demo and example projects. Well it's too bad no such thing exists.
- wtallis 1y ago
  The PR to add the basic infrastructure for engine-level support was posted yesterday. There hasn't been enough time for anything to pass through App Store review yet, let alone all the work that has to happen before that, like writing and releasing the rest of the engine support for visionOS, and writing an application to use it.
  - joshuaturner 1y ago
    smh, game devs always with the excuses
keyle 1y ago
It should probably be a plugin of some sort rather than built in the engine. It's a very small use case scenario and the devices are expensive and rare. Like the comments said there are also concerns about maintaining it in the long term. Having made games in Godot, I'm quite excited by the prospect of making the games within vision OS and playing them in a virtual 3D space. But Apple has only shown its vision for it and the future prospects are very uncertain due to the economic climate and affordability.
- joshuaturner 1y ago
  This is discussed in the PR comments - it's a separate OS and will necessitate changes to core.
v1sea 1y ago
It’s nice to see this addition. I’m not sure if Godot would be better off bridging OpenXR to apple’s ar compositer or do as these PRs implement. It isn’t much work to bridge from a metal renderer to the ar compositor. There are nice, if under documented c apis for Compositor Services in visionOS. I don’t think this will end up being a heavy maintenance burden, but they should donate some headsets as the second vertex amplification doesn’t run in the simulator. The max threads per thread group also differ. So real hardware is needed to measure performance. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compositorservices/drawing-fully-immersive-content-using-metal https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compositorservices...
- luqtas 1y ago
  > they should donate some headsets profiting 180 billion USD per year should put them in a position to also provide grants for hiring workforce for the necessary amount of years that will take to popularize their current and new AR/VR technology (if it'll ever be popular) even if Godot starts also being the backend for non-gaming applications (which i don't know how the discussion about this went/is going), which AVP could also benefit, i doubt the investement of time to maintain this PR will pay itself, i.e. the few developers releasing software for Apple VR will make enough money and will donate enough for covering maintainer(s) to keep up with a (so far niche) new OS in Godot!
DidYaWipe 1y ago
[flagged]
fixprix 1y ago
Looks like Apple might be prioritizing gaming for the next gen Vision devices? Hopefully, as I know many, myself included that passed on the Vision because the gaming support wasn't there. Price was never an issue.
- mvkel 1y ago
  It would be strange if they went about it this way, as it gives the godot community some unprecedented control over apple's release schedule
  - __m 1y ago
    My fear is that they won't treat godot first class and release updates for unity first. That kind of first class support would be required for me to switch from unity.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  Does anyone in the industry care about VR gaming right now? I don't see people buying headsets, I don't see VR features in new major games, it's just not a thing outside of a probably shrinking niche.
  - singularity2001 1y ago
    Lookup GorillaTag a surprise smash hit that made half $1 billion(!) revenue on the Meta quest!
    - darknavi 1y ago
      That is a good example of a good and successful VR game, but it's also three years old.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest. What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.
deleted 1y ago
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andsoitis 1y ago
Godot already supports VR via OpenXR. OpenXR is the Khronos-maintained industry standard for VR/AR devices—supported by SteamVR, Oculus, Vive, Pico, Windows Mixed Reality, Quest. Notably absent is visionOS / Vision Pro. I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard. More scalable, open.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- skeptrune 1y ago
  > The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS. Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. They even failed to follow the Godot contribution guide for the PR itself.
  - eksu 1y ago
    OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan. If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens. Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
skeptrune 1y ago
Insane that Apple put this PR up without at all contributing to the development fund. Didn't even put up an issue first haha.
- azinman2 1y ago
  If they did the work, what’s wrong with that?
  - tapoxi 1y ago
    Are they going to do the ongoing maintenance if this is merged in?
    - wfme 1y ago
      Looks like it would be in their interest to do so, so yeah I don’t see why not.
      - hobofan 1y ago
        There are many things that would be in Apple's interest to do, but they aren't so that's a complete non-argument. I think it's a very valid question to ask, as many open source projects I've seen in the past that had to interface with Apple on the developer tooling front had to go through constant pain, as Apple isn't willing to e.g. provide references for certain .plist files, forcing many project to try and reverse-engineer what they do. More precisely there are usually people inside Apple willing to do that, but incapable to do that due to internal structures that result in a lack of clearly defined ownership. So given that, I would say that if/once the original contributor of this PR moves on(/is made to move on) from that project, there is a good chance that this would also mark the end of cooperation from Apple's side.
    - colechristensen 1y ago
      This question is asked and answered in the linked PR thread.
frosting1337 1y ago
Apple should flick Godot a chunk of change to properly get this rolling.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  What Apple should do is drive a truckload of money on Valve's doorstep and get a Proton-like system built for M-series Macs.
  - tim-- 1y ago
    They have done that. They gave some cash money to CodeWeavers, the company that created wine. It's called the Game Porting Toolkit: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
    - mattlondon 1y ago
      That's the problem I think: porting. As I understand things, proton allows windows games to just work (pun intended) on Linux. No porting, no rebuild - just download and run. Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! Time and time again there have been loads of articles on here over the years with developers saying it is simply not worth the hassle to support Linux and Mac.
      - Hamuko 1y ago
        >Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! So far at least Ubisoft, CAPCOM, Remedy, Kojima Productions and Hello Games.
        andsoitis 1y ago
        And for additional context, when it comes to Vision Pro, Ubisoft has one game that is designed with it in mind (Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse) and CAPCOM has none. That should tell us something about the appetite to support visionOS.
october8140 1y ago
Reading a lot of comments it sounds like Apple should: 1. Give Godot some money. 2. Implement visionOS support via an extension not directly into core OR conform to industry standard OpenXR.
- dagmx 1y ago
  The people making the latter comments are ignoring the contents of this PR however, and showing a lack of understanding of the engine itself in the process. You cannot build this as an extension. It’s a different OS and Godot needs it to be done this way, as many people in the PR have commented as well. An extension would not cover it, and people suggesting that are probably used to the PC VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself. Beyond that, even if Apple supported OpenXR, you’d still need this PR first because it’s covering build support first. It doesn’t cover any of the XR/Spatial rendering elements.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    > VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself This is the crux of the issue, both for Apple and for Godot. In Apple’s case, they’re finding that their vision does not resonate with consumers or developers. So they’re searching for ways to expand chances of success but not entering with an equal partnership mentality. Thats their prerogative but I would argue the arrogance blinds them to reality. From Godot’s perspective, the question is whether all this distraction is worth it for a platform that has for all intents and purposes failed to prove itself. There’s an opportunity cost and likely constraints that would flow from supporting Apple’s divergent and unproven vision. In my books it seems clear that it would be a mistake for Godot to invest energy in supporting a niche, heretofore unsuccessful product that is not aligned with Godot’s technical and product roadmap.
    - aprilnya 1y ago
      I still don’t understand why I see people saying Vision is an unsuccessful and failed platform. Vision Pro is very clearly an early adopter version of a platform that has yet to truly get started. Obviously, a huge $3500 headset on your head is not the actual intended final form of this platform. The actual intended final form is glasses. And until those glasses are out you can’t say it failed, because it hasn’t even started yet.
amelius 1y ago
Back in the day when Microsoft dominated everything, we would have said embrace, extend, extinguish.
- yreg 1y ago
  VisionOS doesn't dominate anything.
- macintosh-hd 1y ago
  There is nothing going on here but embracing. When Microsoft did it, they forked a project and added their own features to their private fork, intending to replace the original. Apple is directly contributing code to the source project here. Even if Apple was somehow harming and attempting to subsume Godot in this situation, what would the end game be? What would managing a game engine descended from Godot do for them?
lordofgibbons 1y ago
This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.
- jitl 1y ago
  The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.
  - marzepini 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more. It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
    - jitl 1y ago
      Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.
elAhmo 1y ago
Both users of visionOS are happy about this announcement.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  This is sad but true. I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for. Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it? I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games. Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
  - judge2020 1y ago
    Pretty much: - big screen mac - 3d movie viewing (the experience is actually mind-blowing)
  - threeseed 1y ago
    > no controller = no games. Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers. So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
    - bathtub365 1y ago
      Those aren’t VR controllers and no one is using them.
      - dvngnt_ 1y ago
        I use gamepads in VR all the time, fewer things to charge and less fatigue
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      > Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers. Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost. > So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers. Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.
raverbashing 1y ago
Jeez, some people are just insufferable I'm glad some people like https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecomment-2820344652 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecommen... exists "why this is not an extension" sounds like an awfully naive question. I'm not a Godot expert but I'd bet a very large amount of money that this is not in the realm of a simple extension, as flexible as Godot can be (and a check of the PR seems to confirm this)
- macintosh-hd 1y ago
  With Godot, you can’t make sweeping platform changes—especially adding a new one—as an extension. This is the only path besides Apple forking Godot, which would be unworkable in the long run and obviously undesirable for both parties.
jonplackett 1y ago
TLDR; We hate Epic and Unreal, can we be friends pllleeeeaaassseeee.
arjonagelhout 1y ago
This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future. While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses. In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot. I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time. All that being said, this is exciting!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- JeremyNT 1y ago
  Can you read that much into it? It seems equally possible that they're beginning to wind things down and they're just releasing what they've got to the public now.
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    Official upstreaming efforts are a significant investment even if they have internal PoCs. You can't just "release what you've got".
    - jayd16 1y ago
      Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.
      - arghwhat 1y ago
        No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly. If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in. (I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)
retskrad 1y ago
Interesting piece from Ben Thomson regarding Apple’s troubles in AI. He says this of Vision Pro: https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-companies-past/#:~:text=In%20truth%2C%20though,the%20new%20one. https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-compani... “We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device. Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”
karmakaze 1y ago
The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.
- zitterbewegung 1y ago
  I think that when Apple pivoted to "Apple Silicon" or basically the M series chips they realized that they should pivot to video games also. Once iOS supported an App Store it came out of the gates organically with people making video games for the platform . Unfortunately they never really followed through with helping game developers or any meaningful QC regarding monetization so you have a lot of good games and a whole lot of bad games. Also, Warframe when they made a switch port they figured out they could make an iOS port which really caught on in Japan.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  There are exactly zero people in the video game industry working on speculative AVP games. The ones who are thinking about it are not hesitating due to Godot support.
  - karmakaze 1y ago
    That's the situation now. It will be different when Godot is supported and the Apple Vision Air is released. Then anyone making VR games/apps will have a new target using standard (though less popular than Unity/UE5) development tooling. It will self-select those who find this reasonable.
    - doctorpangloss 1y ago
      Apple Vision Air will be a fart in the wind. There are 1/10th-1/100th as many Godot developers as Unity and Unreal developers. If there are no games now, there won't be with Godot support. That said I want Godot AVP support to succeed, but there are other problems all in Apple's court.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
extraduder_ire 1y ago
I kind of expected him to be in there, but it was a nice surprise seeing Miguel de Icaza (guy who's the reason unity uses c#) commenting on this addition, with his current work getting swift and godot to play nicely together as well as making xodot for iOS.
DidYaWipe 1y ago
Kinda cool. Meanwhile, Apple could garner way more sales if they simply put a video input on the Vision. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone operators, cinematographers, people using computers in cramped spaces (AKA planes) would all be potential buyers. But nope; Apple's fear of I/O cripples another product.

374 points by whalee 1y ago

Shiny. Unsolicited advice. visionOS is a distraction for the Godot team (whether or not you believe visionOS is a dead end or not). I would recommend focusing on high impact domains while Godot competitors like Unreal and Unity diffuse their attention. If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
solardev 1y ago
That's one of the things they are discussing in the comment chain. Apple hasn't directly addressed it yet. Seems like if they want this to be official, they ought to donate some headsets and money to offset the increased maintenance...
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Apple has more to gain than does Godot. Money and headsets cannot faithfully account for additional complexity and coordination tax. Nevermind potential constraints on other platform expressions of the game engine. What you want to do is first decide whether it is strategically valuable to be on this platform. If it is important, then you want to make sure there’s ROI in approach. Doing things in reverse, I.e. seeing whether there’s a cost-effective path to support another platform before deciding whether to support is is misguided in my opinion. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
999900000999 1y ago
It looks like Apple put their own people on this one. If they want to maintain this, the Godot foundation needs to be extremely clear about that. You're talking about an extremely niche platform that will require tons of ongoing maintenance. I would have hoped Apple also spent time working on the general engine and maybe tackling some bugs. Maybe they did maybe they didn't.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Even debating support for a niche platform is a distraction. Noise.
  - dewey 1y ago
    Niche platform from one of the biggest companies on the planet isn’t as niche as others though. If there’s a way to get first party support from the vendor directly it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      > it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS). In what way? As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven. If true, Godot has nothing to gain. Apple is struggling with adoption so they have most to gain from Godot support for visionOS, but is not obvious that visionOS support would benefit Godot in any strategic manner. One strategic heuristic is that you don’t want to undertake the work to enable another company’s success on a product line, unless you depend on it or believe you have a strategic advantage against other competitors. For example, if Godot negotiates for exclusivity or primary status for game engine positioning on visionOS and they believe VR is a material future footprint, that might be interesting. Anything less is in Apple’s favor and not in Godot’s.
      - dewey 1y ago
        I'll leave this decision to the Godot maintainers but as an outside that only read the PR and comments it seems plausible that it's also in Apples favor to fix issues in the shared iOS / visionOS codebase that they are using, especially if they might come from Apple APIs that could be improved on their side too.
      - spencerflem 1y ago
        exclusivity ?? its an open source project why would they want that, its not a competition :p

etchalon 1y ago

Good on Apple.

waynecochran 1y ago

Are there any apps from this project available in the visionos App Store yet?

saagarjha 1y ago
My guy it's not even merged yet
- ugh123 1y ago
  Godot is open source. I'm sure, at least internally, Apple has tested these changes on one or more 'demo' apps. Any of which could be released as public demos.
  - klausa 1y ago
    Yes, Apple is a company that is famously known for publicly releasing demos and proofs of concepts; especially around games.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    If only had some sort of developer conference coming up in a little over a month. A conference where they release a bunch of demo and example projects. Well it's too bad no such thing exists.
wtallis 1y ago
The PR to add the basic infrastructure for engine-level support was posted yesterday. There hasn't been enough time for anything to pass through App Store review yet, let alone all the work that has to happen before that, like writing and releasing the rest of the engine support for visionOS, and writing an application to use it.
- joshuaturner 1y ago
  smh, game devs always with the excuses

keyle 1y ago

It should probably be a plugin of some sort rather than built in the engine. It's a very small use case scenario and the devices are expensive and rare. Like the comments said there are also concerns about maintaining it in the long term. Having made games in Godot, I'm quite excited by the prospect of making the games within vision OS and playing them in a virtual 3D space. But Apple has only shown its vision for it and the future prospects are very uncertain due to the economic climate and affordability.

joshuaturner 1y ago
This is discussed in the PR comments - it's a separate OS and will necessitate changes to core.

v1sea 1y ago

It’s nice to see this addition. I’m not sure if Godot would be better off bridging OpenXR to apple’s ar compositer or do as these PRs implement. It isn’t much work to bridge from a metal renderer to the ar compositor. There are nice, if under documented c apis for Compositor Services in visionOS. I don’t think this will end up being a heavy maintenance burden, but they should donate some headsets as the second vertex amplification doesn’t run in the simulator. The max threads per thread group also differ. So real hardware is needed to measure performance. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compositorservices/drawing-fully-immersive-content-using-metal https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compositorservices...

luqtas 1y ago
> they should donate some headsets profiting 180 billion USD per year should put them in a position to also provide grants for hiring workforce for the necessary amount of years that will take to popularize their current and new AR/VR technology (if it'll ever be popular) even if Godot starts also being the backend for non-gaming applications (which i don't know how the discussion about this went/is going), which AVP could also benefit, i doubt the investement of time to maintain this PR will pay itself, i.e. the few developers releasing software for Apple VR will make enough money and will donate enough for covering maintainer(s) to keep up with a (so far niche) new OS in Godot!

DidYaWipe 1y ago

[flagged]

fixprix 1y ago

Looks like Apple might be prioritizing gaming for the next gen Vision devices? Hopefully, as I know many, myself included that passed on the Vision because the gaming support wasn't there. Price was never an issue.

mvkel 1y ago
It would be strange if they went about it this way, as it gives the godot community some unprecedented control over apple's release schedule
- __m 1y ago
  My fear is that they won't treat godot first class and release updates for unity first. That kind of first class support would be required for me to switch from unity.
KeplerBoy 1y ago
Does anyone in the industry care about VR gaming right now? I don't see people buying headsets, I don't see VR features in new major games, it's just not a thing outside of a probably shrinking niche.
- singularity2001 1y ago
  Lookup GorillaTag a surprise smash hit that made half $1 billion(!) revenue on the Meta quest!
  - darknavi 1y ago
    That is a good example of a good and successful VR game, but it's also three years old.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest. What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.

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andsoitis 1y ago

Godot already supports VR via OpenXR. OpenXR is the Khronos-maintained industry standard for VR/AR devices—supported by SteamVR, Oculus, Vive, Pico, Windows Mixed Reality, Quest. Notably absent is visionOS / Vision Pro. I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard. More scalable, open.

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skeptrune 1y ago
> The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS. Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. They even failed to follow the Godot contribution guide for the PR itself.
- eksu 1y ago
  OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan. If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial? Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens. Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.

skeptrune 1y ago

Insane that Apple put this PR up without at all contributing to the development fund. Didn't even put up an issue first haha.

azinman2 1y ago
If they did the work, what’s wrong with that?
- tapoxi 1y ago
  Are they going to do the ongoing maintenance if this is merged in?
  - wfme 1y ago
    Looks like it would be in their interest to do so, so yeah I don’t see why not.
    - hobofan 1y ago
      There are many things that would be in Apple's interest to do, but they aren't so that's a complete non-argument. I think it's a very valid question to ask, as many open source projects I've seen in the past that had to interface with Apple on the developer tooling front had to go through constant pain, as Apple isn't willing to e.g. provide references for certain .plist files, forcing many project to try and reverse-engineer what they do. More precisely there are usually people inside Apple willing to do that, but incapable to do that due to internal structures that result in a lack of clearly defined ownership. So given that, I would say that if/once the original contributor of this PR moves on(/is made to move on) from that project, there is a good chance that this would also mark the end of cooperation from Apple's side.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    This question is asked and answered in the linked PR thread.

frosting1337 1y ago

Apple should flick Godot a chunk of change to properly get this rolling.

theshrike79 1y ago
What Apple should do is drive a truckload of money on Valve's doorstep and get a Proton-like system built for M-series Macs.
- tim-- 1y ago
  They have done that. They gave some cash money to CodeWeavers, the company that created wine. It's called the Game Porting Toolkit: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
  - mattlondon 1y ago
    That's the problem I think: porting. As I understand things, proton allows windows games to just work (pun intended) on Linux. No porting, no rebuild - just download and run. Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! Time and time again there have been loads of articles on here over the years with developers saying it is simply not worth the hassle to support Linux and Mac.
    - Hamuko 1y ago
      >Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! So far at least Ubisoft, CAPCOM, Remedy, Kojima Productions and Hello Games.
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        And for additional context, when it comes to Vision Pro, Ubisoft has one game that is designed with it in mind (Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse) and CAPCOM has none. That should tell us something about the appetite to support visionOS.

october8140 1y ago

Reading a lot of comments it sounds like Apple should: 1. Give Godot some money. 2. Implement visionOS support via an extension not directly into core OR conform to industry standard OpenXR.

dagmx 1y ago
The people making the latter comments are ignoring the contents of this PR however, and showing a lack of understanding of the engine itself in the process. You cannot build this as an extension. It’s a different OS and Godot needs it to be done this way, as many people in the PR have commented as well. An extension would not cover it, and people suggesting that are probably used to the PC VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself. Beyond that, even if Apple supported OpenXR, you’d still need this PR first because it’s covering build support first. It doesn’t cover any of the XR/Spatial rendering elements.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself This is the crux of the issue, both for Apple and for Godot. In Apple’s case, they’re finding that their vision does not resonate with consumers or developers. So they’re searching for ways to expand chances of success but not entering with an equal partnership mentality. Thats their prerogative but I would argue the arrogance blinds them to reality. From Godot’s perspective, the question is whether all this distraction is worth it for a platform that has for all intents and purposes failed to prove itself. There’s an opportunity cost and likely constraints that would flow from supporting Apple’s divergent and unproven vision. In my books it seems clear that it would be a mistake for Godot to invest energy in supporting a niche, heretofore unsuccessful product that is not aligned with Godot’s technical and product roadmap.
  - aprilnya 1y ago
    I still don’t understand why I see people saying Vision is an unsuccessful and failed platform. Vision Pro is very clearly an early adopter version of a platform that has yet to truly get started. Obviously, a huge $3500 headset on your head is not the actual intended final form of this platform. The actual intended final form is glasses. And until those glasses are out you can’t say it failed, because it hasn’t even started yet.

amelius 1y ago

Back in the day when Microsoft dominated everything, we would have said embrace, extend, extinguish.

yreg 1y ago
VisionOS doesn't dominate anything.
macintosh-hd 1y ago
There is nothing going on here but embracing. When Microsoft did it, they forked a project and added their own features to their private fork, intending to replace the original. Apple is directly contributing code to the source project here. Even if Apple was somehow harming and attempting to subsume Godot in this situation, what would the end game be? What would managing a game engine descended from Godot do for them?

lordofgibbons 1y ago

This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.

jitl 1y ago
The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.
- marzepini 1y ago
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- bigyabai 1y ago
  I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more. It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
  - jitl 1y ago
    Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.

elAhmo 1y ago

Both users of visionOS are happy about this announcement.

jonplackett 1y ago
This is sad but true. I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for. Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it? I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games. Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
- judge2020 1y ago
  Pretty much: - big screen mac - 3d movie viewing (the experience is actually mind-blowing)
- threeseed 1y ago
  > no controller = no games. Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers. So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
  - bathtub365 1y ago
    Those aren’t VR controllers and no one is using them.
    - dvngnt_ 1y ago
      I use gamepads in VR all the time, fewer things to charge and less fatigue
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    > Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers. Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost. > So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers. Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.

raverbashing 1y ago

Jeez, some people are just insufferable I'm glad some people like https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecomment-2820344652 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecommen... exists "why this is not an extension" sounds like an awfully naive question. I'm not a Godot expert but I'd bet a very large amount of money that this is not in the realm of a simple extension, as flexible as Godot can be (and a check of the PR seems to confirm this)

macintosh-hd 1y ago
With Godot, you can’t make sweeping platform changes—especially adding a new one—as an extension. This is the only path besides Apple forking Godot, which would be unworkable in the long run and obviously undesirable for both parties.

jonplackett 1y ago

TLDR; We hate Epic and Unreal, can we be friends pllleeeeaaassseeee.

arjonagelhout 1y ago

This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future. While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses. In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot. I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time. All that being said, this is exciting!

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JeremyNT 1y ago
Can you read that much into it? It seems equally possible that they're beginning to wind things down and they're just releasing what they've got to the public now.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  Official upstreaming efforts are a significant investment even if they have internal PoCs. You can't just "release what you've got".
  - jayd16 1y ago
    Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.
    - arghwhat 1y ago
      No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly. If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in. (I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)

retskrad 1y ago

Interesting piece from Ben Thomson regarding Apple’s troubles in AI. He says this of Vision Pro: https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-companies-past/#:~:text=In%20truth%2C%20though,the%20new%20one. https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-compani... “We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device. Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”

karmakaze 1y ago

The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.

zitterbewegung 1y ago
I think that when Apple pivoted to "Apple Silicon" or basically the M series chips they realized that they should pivot to video games also. Once iOS supported an App Store it came out of the gates organically with people making video games for the platform . Unfortunately they never really followed through with helping game developers or any meaningful QC regarding monetization so you have a lot of good games and a whole lot of bad games. Also, Warframe when they made a switch port they figured out they could make an iOS port which really caught on in Japan.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
There are exactly zero people in the video game industry working on speculative AVP games. The ones who are thinking about it are not hesitating due to Godot support.
- karmakaze 1y ago
  That's the situation now. It will be different when Godot is supported and the Apple Vision Air is released. Then anyone making VR games/apps will have a new target using standard (though less popular than Unity/UE5) development tooling. It will self-select those who find this reasonable.
  - doctorpangloss 1y ago
    Apple Vision Air will be a fart in the wind. There are 1/10th-1/100th as many Godot developers as Unity and Unreal developers. If there are no games now, there won't be with Godot support. That said I want Godot AVP support to succeed, but there are other problems all in Apple's court.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

extraduder_ire 1y ago

I kind of expected him to be in there, but it was a nice surprise seeing Miguel de Icaza (guy who's the reason unity uses c#) commenting on this addition, with his current work getting swift and godot to play nicely together as well as making xodot for iOS.

DidYaWipe 1y ago

Kinda cool. Meanwhile, Apple could garner way more sales if they simply put a video input on the Vision. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone operators, cinematographers, people using computers in cramped spaces (AKA planes) would all be potential buyers. But nope; Apple's fear of I/O cripples another product.