Apple has begun contributing official support for its Vision Pro headset to the popular Godot game engine. Ricardo Sanchez-Saez, a senior iOS engineer working on Apple’s visionOS team, announced the effort via a pull request (PR) submitted to the Godot project on GitHub.
This first contribution lays the foundational groundwork for running Godot applications natively on the visionOS platform.
“We’re really excited to be working with the Godot community on adding visionOS support,” said Sanchez-Saez. “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.”
He also acknowledged the potential complexity, stating, “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.”
Strategic goals for Vision Pro and Godot: Planar and immersive experiences
Apple’s immediate objectives for integrating visionOS with Godot are twofold.
Firstly, they aim to enable existing Godot games and applications to run natively within a standard planar window on the Vision Pro headset. Secondly, and perhaps more excitingly for developers exploring spatial computing, they intend to facilitate the creation of fully immersive experiences through a new, dedicated Godot visionOS VR Plugin.
To manage the review process effectively, Apple has structured the work into three distinct, sequential PRs:
- Native visionOS platform: This initial PR establishes the core platform support, heavily based on the existing iOS codebase to maximise code reuse. (This PR is the one currently submitted).
- Swift integration & SwiftUI lifecycle: This subsequent step will add the capability to compile and link Swift files within Godot, replacing the standard main.mm entry point on visionOS with the SwiftUI application lifecycle. This is crucial for launching immersive scenes.
- Vision Pro VR plugin: The final planned stage will introduce the specific plugin required for developers to build and deploy immersive VR experiences using Godot on the Vision Pro.
Sanchez-Saez clarified the rollout plan: “Even though we have a working version including points 2 and 3, those PRs are not up yet. Our current plan is to open them sequentially, after each of the previous PRs merge.”
Leveraging existing code
The technical approach detailed in the first PR involves creating a new native visionOS platform definition within Godot.
Recognising the similarities with iOS, the Apple team has introduced a new drivers/apple_embedded directory. This allows code that is common to both iOS and visionOS (but not macOS) to be shared, mirroring the existing drivers/apple folder used for code applicable across all Apple platforms.
“The platform-specific logic… was refactored, and now the bulk of the implementation is on drivers/apple_embedded,” explained Sanchez-Saez. “The platforms provide small subclasses that specialise the concrete aspects that are different between platforms.”
A key technical constraint highlighted is that the new visionOS platform within Godot will not include OpenGL support, as the underlying operating system itself does not support it. Metal will be the rendering backend.
The code-sharing approach impacts documentation structure. The existing EditorExportPlatformIOS.xml file – which defines export options – has been renamed to EditorExportPlatformAppleEmbedded.xml and moved to the shared directory, as most options now apply to both iOS and visionOS.
Apple is specifically requesting community guidance on how best to handle platform-specific documentation nuances within this shared structure or via modifications to the documentation tooling.
Testing thus far has focused on the ‘Platformer’ demo project, verifying functionality on both iOS and visionOS using the Mobile and Forward+ renderers with Metal. However, Apple is seeking community assistance in testing several areas where their internal setups differ from typical external developer environments:
- Plugin embedding: Testing the export template’s ability to correctly embed and link third-party plugins at export time on visionOS.
- Direct export/deployment: Verifying Archive/IPA export and ‘One-Click-Deploy’ functionality, which the team couldn’t get working reliably, potentially due to differences in developer account configurations.
- ios_deploy: Testing deployment using the older ios_deploy tool (used pre-Xcode 14) or advising if support for it can be deprecated and removed to simplify the codebase.
This contribution marks a potentially pivotal moment for Godot developers, opening up Apple’s spatial computing platform. It also represents a notable step for Apple in collaborating directly with a major open-source game engine community to support its latest hardware.
The structured approach and call for feedback suggest a desire for genuine integration, paving the way for potentially rich immersive experiences built with Godot on Vision Pro.
See also: EU DMA: Apple and Meta hit with first major fines
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