Native visionOS platform support

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.

> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.

Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL.

Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things.

The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.

> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.

Why the vitriol?

Apple did in fact initiate and co-create the WebGPU standard [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU

Edit to include quote of parent comment.

Correct... But from my understanding... OpenXR isnt reliant on OpenGL? it supports Vulkan, DirectX and metal -- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872

Apple has no intention of fitting within godot’s GTM strategy for VR via OpenXR standard.

Amongst other signals, the PR comment says: “To support creating Immersive experiences by using a new Godot's visionOS VR Plugin.”

Considering install base, I'd figure the Vision Pro isn't big enough to pressure Godot.

Apple is big enough to sponsor Godot and should if they want to burden their maintainers with extra work long term.

> 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.

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/

Maintainers have to review the PR, answer Apple's "Open Questions", and support their users who want to build with the new functionality long term.

Laughably, it looks like the PR didn't even compile...[1]

> When you try and bundle, it will fail. The library paths are incorrect.

[1]: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#pullrequest...

There's more to development than just code. I'm sure the Godot developers value the contribution and will try to make the most of it, but they got zero input into how to implement it and this PR contains a lot of issues (e.g. it does some API breaking changes that can't just be done as-is.) On top of that, they have no idea (from the outset, I mean: obviously they are communicating now) if Apple intends to continue maintaining this code in the long run or if they just want to put the minimum amount of effort into shipping it and then consider that box checked, shifting the maintenance burden to volunteers. I don't think there needs to be intentional malice, even very nice gestures can work out poorly; we almost lost the Linux NTFS3 driver because Paragon initially stopped maintaining it and nobody else stepped up.

I think Apple can do good here but they should definitely communicate better. For open source, early and often is a good idea. (Though also good to follow through... I have been guilty of many licked cookies purely by accident and poor focus.)

Are they going to do the ongoing maintenance if this is merged in?

It no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.

It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.

Lookup GorillaTag a surprise smash hit that made half $1 billion(!) revenue on the Meta quest!

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.

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.

Even debating support for a niche platform is a distraction. Noise.

And since Apple is here, please help adding support for Apple TV. Apple and Android TV support sometimes makes the difference when choosing an engine.

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.