Godot Now Has Rudimentary Support For visionOS

Games made in the Godot engine can now run in a window on visionOS, with immersive XR support planned for later this year.

If you're unaware, Godot is a free and open-source alternative to Unity and Unreal Engine. It's technically controlled by the non-profit Godot Foundation, but all development takes place in the open.

Last month, an Apple employee on the visionOS engineering team created a massive pull request on Godot's GitHub, meaning thousands of lines of code adding support for visionOS alongside a written request for permission to merge this code into the master Godot branch.

The reaction of Godot contributors was mixed, with one complaining that "hardware to test it is extremely expensive", while expressing skepticism as to whether anyone in the core Godot team "even has interest to maintain it", asking for a good reason visionOS support should be a core feature rather than an extension or plugin. Adding new platforms and features to software means continuing to maintain and test those features over time, no small feat.

However, the lead developer of XR support in Godot, Bastiaan Olij, pushed back on those concerns, calling the PR "an amazing milestone" and thanking Apple for it. While acknowledging that it would be "a mammoth task" to review and test, Olij made the technical argument that visionOS support could only reasonably be achieved in the core of the engine, not as a plugin.

Olij's view won out, and you can see on the PR how Godot's community worked together to address concerns and get initial visionOS support merged into Godot. This initial visionOS support is limited to games running in a window, and immersive XR support is set to arrive later this year via a plugin.

Even the initial visionOS support is not available in a pre-compiled Godot release yet, to be clear, but the code has been merged into the GitHub master branch, so anyone who compiles the engine from source can already start building for visionOS.

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The Godot engine has recently made significant improvements to its support for VR and mixed reality.

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Godot already has full support for a wide range of other XR platforms, thanks to its support for OpenXR, including SteamVR on PC and all major Android standalone headsets. It also implements Meta-specific OpenXR extensions for Quest features like Spatial Anchors and inside-out body tracking.

Bastiaan Olij has previously said that the quality and breadth of Godot's OpenXR support has "benefited greatly" from financial and technical support from Meta, with the results "improving the experience not just for Meta Quest users, but also for other XR systems".

Last year a Meta engineer even released a port of the Godot editor itself for Horizon OS, enabling the development of full games completely standalone on Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets.

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The Godot engine is now available on Horizon OS, meaning you can develop full games completely standalone on Quest.

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Of course, Apple Vision Pro does not support OpenXR, which is making adding support for it significantly more complex than it would have been if it did.