Godot now has rudimentary support for visionOS. Godot, a free-and-open-source alternative engine to Unreal Engine and Unity, is now available for visionOS. The non-profit Godot Foundation technically controls it, but development is done in an open environment. The visionOS engineering team at Apple posted

to Godot’s GitHub last month. It was thousands of line of code that added support for visionOS along with a request for permission for the code to be merged into the Godot master branch. Godot contributors had mixed reactions to

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complained that “hardware to test is extremely expensive” while others expressed doubts about whether the core Godot staff “even have interest to maintain it”. They asked for a reason why visionOS support shouldn’t be a core feature and not an extension or plug-in. It is no easy feat to add new features and platforms to software, and to continue to test and maintain them over time. Bastiaan Olj, Godot’s lead developer for XR, pushed back against these concerns. He called the PR “an amazing milestone”, and thanked Apple. Olij acknowledged that a “mammoth task’ would have to be undertaken in order to test and review the visionOS plugin, but he a massive pull request that this could not be done as it was not feasible. You can see how Godot’s community came together and listened to concerns in order to get the initial visionOS integration into Godot. The initial visionOS support will only be available for games that run in a browser window. Immersive XR support via a plugin is expected later this year. To be clear, visionOS support has not yet been included in a Godot pre-compiled release. However, the code for visionOS is already available on the GitHub master branch. Anyone who compiles Godot from source can start building visionOS. Godot is already fully compatible with a number of other XR platforms thanks to its OpenXR support, such as SteamVR on the PC and major Android standalone VR headsets. It implements Meta-specific OpenXR Extensions for Quest features such as Spatial Anchors, inside-out tracking and body tracking. Bastiaan Oliverj said in the past that Godot’s OpenXR Support has “benefited greatly” by

, and the results have “improved the experience for Meta Quest Users, as well as other XR Systems”. A Meta engineer released one last year, which enabled the development of complete games on Quest 3 or Quest Pro headsets. Apple Vision Pro, of course, does not support OpenXR. Adding support for it is therefore much more complicated than if Apple Vision Pro did.