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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here using Godot for VR/AR dev? ...curious what's the story here and how it stands against Unity on this front since I'm lately interested with developing VR productivity apps and using a game-engine seems like kind of the only viable cross-platform solution for this, the path that others have taken too.

But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)

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I can recommend Godot for VR. I switched from Unity to Godot a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. I'm developing for the Quest on Mac and Godot is significantly faster in building to run on your device. Plus, the hot-reload feature means that you don't need to rebuild every time (although once your Quest goes to sleep you need to rebuild). Other than that, I love Godot's node system, that it's compatibile with a mulitude of languages (although GDScript is awesome and I didn't need to add C# or something as of yet).

If you're looking at the Quest, Holger Dammertz is doing an awesome job with the Oculus Quest Toolkit[0] where I'm also a contributor.

[0]: https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit

Thanks! My dev setup would also be "for Quest, on a Macbook" 80% of the time, so it means a lot if you found the very same scenario to work :)

...still hacking around with Unity, but after I get a basic PoC of what I'm doing I might switch to Godot (with C# as the language) for developing the actual MVC.

Sounds good. Let me know if you have any questions =)

I'm making RoomWithAView [1] in Godot. Not quite a productivity app, more an apartment builder/computer interface. Although on a bit of a hiatus (and a bit buggy) for the time being.

I'm pulling in desktop screens to VR which can be moved and placed as wanted. Working on pulling in individual applications and doing application launching. Aside from that it exposes a good bit of file system access in game. So a decent amount of stuff a productivity app may want to do.

I'm not a Unity guy but I briefly tried VR in Unity and the support seemed quite fractured. SteamVR has multiple versions across stores/github and I wasn't sure which to use, ditto for various tool kits. Godot I just downloaded a sample project and striped it down then worked off that.

The hardest part is doing anything non-gamey. Occasionally I'll make a help post and people will just reply "why would anyone want to do that?" but the C# support means you can use just about any libraries out there, so pretty much anything is possible with enough fiddling. I dropped the idea but even had OpenCV working with the Index's webcams at one point.

[1] https://ark1ve.itch.io/roomwithaview

I built that [1] with it. Getting somehting playable was incredibly fast (but I guess that's not different from unity), and I have not hit any major roadblocks yet. Development was rather smooth. The fact that the hand tracking was supported even before it was supported in Unreal Engine (as far as I know) is also a major plus. A big shout out to Holger Dammertz who did the work on that.

[1] www.vrworkout.at

Just checked out your project's github, very impressive. Can't wait to get my Quest and trying it out, thanks for sharing.

The github page does not yet reflect the very latest release, still have to upload the video (due to lack of time :) ). But the latest version has an additional freeplay mode without music (just the sound effects), that way you can play your own music hit the drum to the beat of the music to tell the game the BPM and then you can play to your own background music.

I’m using it for VR dev on the oculus quest and I think the dev experience in 3.2 is very good. I haven’t actually used Unity, though, so not sure how it compares.

Once you get it all set up, you can just hit the android button and it’ll export the apk directly to the device. Also, you are still able to live view via wifi.

Game engines are not the only path for that kind of app. I have written apps (not games) using just OpenVR and Vulkan. The only questionable choice in that combo was Vulkan - bootstrapping that was a major time sink. OpenVR doesn't have tons of documentation, but when you start out from one of the examples, you should be fine. It is a pretty decent API.

Yeah, there's not a lot of choice in how you represent an API for a VR headset. You have to give the implementing program a position and orientation at some point. And you have to do it fast. So I think most of the APIs end up pretty similar in concepts because of that. In some cases, the data structures are almost identical, other than the names of fields.

That is true. Some of the OpenVR input event handling and compositor interaction is a bit weird, if you need any of that at all. The rest is quite straightforward.

It's not the API itself, but juggling all the different coordinate systems (room, eyes, controllers etc.) that tends to keep things interesting.

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