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Godot Engine to work on Vulkan support

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Speaking on their official blog, Godot Engine [Official Site] developer Juan Linietsky writes about how the open source game engine will be getting Vulkan API support.

Previously, they were focusing on OpenGL ES 3 to get support for Desktop Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, iOS and WebGL 2.0. It seems OpenGL ES 3 has a variety of problems including poor support from hardwar vendors, buggy drivers and so it didn't really go as they had hoped.

With MoltenVK now open source allowing for Mac/iOS support, they seem confident enough to be able to work with it to drop OpenGL ES 3 and stick with Vulkan and OpenGL ES 2.0.

No word yet on when it will see Vulkan support, as they already have a roadmap ready for Godot 3.1. Once that's done, they said they will begin writing the Vulkan backend then. They are estimating the Vulkan work to take around "one or two months" and when ready they will release a new version of Godot with Vulkan (and whatever else was worked on during that time).

Good news though, hopefully we will see even more Vulkan adoption and Godot Engine too.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

natewardawg Feb 27, 2018
Yes! So exciting :)
Kimyrielle Feb 27, 2018
From what I heard, some developers are keen on -either- DX12 or Vulkan right now. Some voiced that DX11 is "good enough" and low-level APIs aren't worth the additional trouble.

If that holds true, Vulkan might not turn out to be the perfect solution for cross-platform development we hoped for, and we'd still face the issue that DX11 is both the better API and massively more popular than OpenGL.

Still glad to see that they're going to add it!
natewardawg Feb 27, 2018
Quoting: KimyrielleSome voiced that DX11 is "good enough" and low-level APIs aren't worth the additional trouble.

Very true, but these are almost exclusively people who are writing an in-house engine for lightweight games that wouldn't be bottlenecked with draw calls. Many of these types of developers write an entire engine for each game and a limited number of platforms, so I can see why Vulkan is simply too much in these cases. These developers tend to be pretty popular (IE. Jonathan Blow) and don't actually represent most game developers whether AAA or Indie.

This same logic doesn't apply to a general purpose engine like Godot/Unity/Unreal/etc since, theoretically speaking, even taking an entire year to make a proper Vulkan implementation benefits large amounts of game developers and you don't have to rewrite it from scratch per game.

Most game developers use general purpose engines, even AAA studios typically use a general purpose engine, like Unreal, and then modify it if they need to.

Quoting: KimyrielleStill glad to see that they're going to add it!

Absolutely, me too!!! :)
STiAT Feb 27, 2018
Does not matter when. It does matter they try or are able to give it a try.

If they "fail" or at least if it seems to have even more issues that's fine. Giving it a shot (or being able to give it a shot) is actually a cool decision. Especially since there is .. quite some work involved (which is an understatement on itself).

I hope they get their goal closer with that. I really do.
Leopard Feb 28, 2018
Quoting: KimyrielleFrom what I heard, some developers are keen on -either- DX12 or Vulkan right now. Some voiced that DX11 is "good enough" and low-level APIs aren't worth the additional trouble.

If that holds true, Vulkan might not turn out to be the perfect solution for cross-platform development we hoped for, and we'd still face the issue that DX11 is both the better API and massively more popular than OpenGL.

Still glad to see that they're going to add it!

Still most of the devs will go with Dx11 or ( much less than Dx11 ) OpenGL.

Because their work will still perform good enough. That is why we saw Dx12 and Vulkan on so high profiled games. These api's need much more knowledge to use it efficiently.

Of course , if Vulkan make into standart engines we will see much more Vulkan games because it is on Win7 , Win8 , MacOS and Linux too.
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