Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2: A Partial Post Mortem
11 hours ago
- Godot can ship commercial VR, but an early adopter tax of roughly £80k was incurred for engine work.
- The speaker's studio has built multiple VR games in Godot, facing challenges like missing render features, physics issues, and funding cuts.
- Godot's core architecture has 1990s-style design flaws: mutex-heavy object management, non-bindless renderer, POSIX IO, and a problematic shader pipeline.
- A community PS5/PSVR2 port was created by George Marques (build system) and André Ewald (render work), with 2D games now runnable.
- A new render server for Godot 4.7 was written from scratch: bindless, lock-free, material-driven, with platform-native shaders and unified scale by default.
- Platform holders are encouraged to engage with Godot for more realistic demos, as seen with NVIDIA, Apple, and community ports.
- Godot is best adopted as a seed for your technology stack—fork, customize, and own your code while benefiting from a common interface.
- The Godot Foundation's vision statement emphasizes accessibility and community alignment, guiding future development.
- Game developers are urged to contribute to the PlayStation port, engage with shader template work, and support the ecosystem.