Open source game engine 'Godot Engine' has the first 3.0 release candidate available

A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.

Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

It looks like Thomas Herzog will likely be working on that at some point in the future. But, it really didn't make much sense to support it yet since Vulkan doesn't work on all of Godot's target devices, but GLES3 does. So, I'm going to make a guess that it will start being worked on in about a year from now. This is probably a good move since there will be even more experience/documentation out there as to how to implement it best. I think it's an overall good thing to wait a little while for it if it's going to be in the engine for the long haul.

https://godotengine.org/article/please-help-us-reach-our-second-patreon-goal-so-we-can-hire-thomas-part-time

At the bottom of the above article it says, "[After re-implementing GLES2], Thomas will help improve the existing 2D and 3D renderers, as well as contemplating future platforms (such as Vulkan)."

Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

Please no different licenses.

Spoiler, click me


Last edited by Beaky on 15 Jan 2018 at 2:26 pm UTC

Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

Please no different licenses.

Spoiler, click me


Agreed, I think indiegogo is a great idea! Licenses, however, would be a quick way to lose a lot of supporters... Why not just use Unity, Unreal, or CRYENGINE at that point?


Last edited by natewardawg on 15 Jan 2018 at 4:28 pm UTC

A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

At face value I'm sure it doesn't look correct, but the VR support was added by Bastian Olij who I'm quite sure isn't a core team member. So, the reason we have it is because someone graciously gave up their time to add it. [edit] With that said, I don't think it *requires* Vulkan, but the performance will probably be much better once Godot has Vulkan :)

https://github.com/BastiaanOlij


Last edited by natewardawg on 16 Jan 2018 at 1:53 am UTC

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

Not at all! SteamVR on Linux can run OpenGL VR games just fine, there are extensions to both OpenGL and Vulkan to share buffers directly. It works quite well, even on AMD. (And improvements still coming as well).

I am personally testing VR with Godot since some time on Linux, making sure it's working :D. Right now there is a bug in the code that makes Godot crash, but hopefully it can get resolved soon.


Last edited by beniwtv on 16 Jan 2018 at 10:30 am UTC

no shader is working on my rig...

Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

Or maybe you could support their patreon https://www.patreon.com/godotengine that lets them hire on their core developers full time.

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

Not at all! SteamVR on Linux can run OpenGL VR games just fine, there are extensions to both OpenGL and Vulkan to share buffers directly. It works quite well, even on AMD. (And improvements still coming as well).

I am personally testing VR with Godot since some time on Linux, making sure it's working :D. Right now there is a bug in the code that makes Godot crash, but hopefully it can get resolved soon.

Are you sure? Everything I'd read about it basically inferred that you had to have Vulkan support for it to work correctly. For example, I have Serious Sam VR which works great in Linux. But I also have AliceVR, which loads, but does not display in the actual headset. I had come to the conclusion it was because the SteamVR overlay only routes the output to the HMD under Vulkan, which the Unreal Engine (that Alice VR uses) does not support.

Are there any OpenGL games that work in SteamVR under Linux?

Are you sure? Everything I'd read about it basically inferred that you had to have Vulkan support for it to work correctly. For example, I have Serious Sam VR which works great in Linux. But I also have AliceVR, which loads, but does not display in the actual headset. I had come to the conclusion it was because the SteamVR overlay only routes the output to the HMD under Vulkan, which the Unreal Engine (that Alice VR uses) does not support.

Are there any OpenGL games that work in SteamVR under Linux?

Yes, pretty sure. Everspace is an OpenGl game that works, Dungeon Hero too (not a good VR game tho), Zaccaria Pinball AFAIK is OpenGL too, and of course, Godot is only OpenGL.

Then there are other games on this list using OpenGL I haven't personally tried:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/250820/discussions/5/133257959064016658/

About AliceVR: AFAIK, that does not support VR on Linux, at least not that I am aware of. Note that not all games listing Linux and VR support on their store page support both at the same time.

In most of these, VR is disabled on Linux, as it's quite new and the devs didn't provide a build / tested VR on Linux. Always check the list above, where we are compiling a list of games that do work.

Are you sure? Everything I'd read about it basically inferred that you had to have Vulkan support for it to work correctly. For example, I have Serious Sam VR which works great in Linux. But I also have AliceVR, which loads, but does not display in the actual headset. I had come to the conclusion it was because the SteamVR overlay only routes the output to the HMD under Vulkan, which the Unreal Engine (that Alice VR uses) does not support.

Are there any OpenGL games that work in SteamVR under Linux?

The only reason why Vulkan might be needed is for performance reasons. OpenGL has been able to render to multiple render buffers for a long time. All that's needed is to render a separate frame for each eye to account for eye separation, and then pop the render buffer to the VR headset. There are stereoscopic games that have been able to do this for a long time now in GL, which is essentially doing the same thing.