If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
If they want to maintain this, the Godot foundation needs to be extremely clear about that. You're talking about an extremely niche platform that will require tons of ongoing maintenance.
I would have hoped Apple also spent time working on the general engine and maybe tackling some bugs. Maybe they did maybe they didn't.
In what way?
As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven. If true, Godot has nothing to gain. Apple is struggling with adoption so they have most to gain from Godot support for visionOS, but is not obvious that visionOS support would benefit Godot in any strategic manner.
One strategic heuristic is that you don’t want to undertake the work to enable another company’s success on a product line, unless you depend on it or believe you have a strategic advantage against other competitors.
For example, if Godot negotiates for exclusivity or primary status for game engine positioning on visionOS and they believe VR is a material future footprint, that might be interesting. Anything less is in Apple’s favor and not in Godot’s.
The point is to make the world better not for their own project to Win.
I'm assuming Godot is the same way, and the idea of spending effort making sure every other OSS engine doesn't have VisionOS support is a lil baffling
Yes, and now it has gotten to the point where it clearly has been noticed by Apple; and they're eager to contribute back to it too.
Is that not... the ideal scenario here? You have community contribute a port for a big platform, the company notices, and starts contributing too.
To think Apple is interested in the success of Godot would be a mistake. It might feel like a compliment, but it would be a trap because Apple’s interest stems from increasing the chances of visionOS success and will be happy to externalize the ongoing maintenance tax to Godot.
Unless Godot feels they need visionOS then it isn’t in their interest to entertain Apple’s PR. If anything they should respond saying they already support standard interface in the form of OpenXR.
Additionally, if Godot accepts this PR and related ongoing work, it would signal to me poor strategic judgment.
Many an open source project progress slows down under the burden of supporting immaterial platforms.
Beyond that, have you even looked at the PR here to see what your supposed distraction would be? Most of the PR is shared infrastructure between the Apple embedded platforms.
They answered this in their initial comment:
> If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
Just because this one very angry person doesn’t want this platform supported, doesn’t mean others don’t. You could argue the exact same thing in reverse for any other platform that is niche for someone else.
Either monetarily, or with personnel. What I would have really liked to see is for them to not only fix issues relating to their own products, but to help Godot as a whole. Maybe, even add Swift as a scripting option without a hard requirement of owning a Mac.
This looks like a one time "gift" of high maintenance code. It's not like when Microsoft assisted with C# support. I don't need to buy a Windows PC or a $3500 Microsoft headset to make use of that.
It's also really rude to just open a giant PR without a discussion first.
Would you mind explaining why you feel that way?
I understand being cautious about accepting the PR, but can’t say I quite understand why submitting it would be rude
Apple should of made it clear what they want to do, and an ongoing commitment of any before opening the PR.
Even when it comes to TV, Apple realized they had to create an Apple TV+ app for other platforms to extend the reach of their investment in shows/movies beyond their own hardware.
So, if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.
Compared to other HDMI-connected devices (e.g. Google Streamer fka ChromeCast, Amazon FireTV, Roku) or major TV platforms like Android TV or Samsung and LG, the market share that Apple TV commands is dwarfed. Apple TV devices are also very expensive.
A startup like Zwift that bets on Apple TV as a key GTM strategy is making an error in judgment. Apple TV is extreme long tail footprint.
But yeah, I'm not an Insider and I'd love to know why they're supporting the apple tv but don't offer the Android App on the Google tv platform. Maybe something about non universal remote inputs or the wildly varying hw capabilities leading to support nightmares (but that's always an issue on Android).
Presentation form factor and input modality is different on LRUD compared to touch, 10’ vs handheld.
There’s an opportunity cost: it is better to improve the user experience on the vast majority of TV devices (eg Samsung or Android TV or Fire tv) than it is to support a tiny market share device like Apple TV that you now also need to keep up to date.
godot seems cool, would love to get some vision lite dev kit in a few years to play with
But the support from Google is abysmal. No search functionality, developer hostility when trying to publish something etc.
Apple TV is just a tale of so many missed opportunities.
Order(s) of magnitude less niche than Apple Vision.
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.