Xogot – Godot for iPad

It was massively overblown. Godot is fine. Redot has none of the main godot developers. The ended up with 10x more controversy on their own discord, than on the official Godot one.

I just had a quick look at their github, and almost everything is just merging PRs from standard Godot. Either they will stay close enough to the standard code they can keep merging (in which case, why exist?), or they will eventually start getting more different, in which case they are going to need a lot more developers to do anything useful.

Look at this post about their latest "beta release", they are just linking to the godot PRs they merged: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedotGameEngineMain/comments/1gisaz...

Godot is fine. This was their statement https://x.com/godotfoundation/status/1840721449364988300?t=S... Basically they made a post showing support for LGBT+, and they got a bunch of harrassment so they banned people.

Also what were the political tirades and banned contributors?

When software projects fork for petty ideological reasons, they fail. None of the skilled developers moved over to Redot. Godot continues to get support and features. Redot still can't figure out how to refactor the code to remove references to Godot.

It seems like you follow it closely enough to have a strongly-biased opinion.

You should try meeting some trans people in real life. I think it would change your perspective a lot.

Agreed. For more detail, I trust Thor@PirateSoftware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTxyu_p1qkc

I wouldn’t inflict them on the trans people I know.

Rather than do snipe comments can you dispute or show where this person is misrepresenting what happened for the rest of us

This is a project of Miguel de Icaza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

> And then there was more controversy in their discord, which they later falsely claimed was the “unofficial” discord even though it was listed on the community part of their website and run by their social media people

There are two discords linked from the community section[1], one of them is listed under “Official communities” and the other under “User-supported communities”. The discord in question is the latter, the unofficial one.

[1]: https://godotengine.org/community/

Impressive, happy to see another touch from Miguel.

I’ve been following the development of this via Miguel’s blog and mastodon, and as someone who is really interested in iPad development and app design I really want to try it out but I just don’t have time for another hobby.

I’m signing up and gonna try it out, but I feel like I’ll need to put more than an afternoon of dabbling to get anywhere interesting.

Yep, he switched focus after how everything went with Xamarin post acquisition, seems pretty much done with anything .NET.

This is very impressive, and runs well even on an iPad mini 5.

He worked on Mono for nearly two decades, and contributed significantly to the platform. He may have stopped working on it because the platform is quite mature (and Open Source) and his continued work would have limited impact.

I am a bit surprised Apple allows it.

I am not really familiar with the apple ecosystem, but my understanding is that they frown on open execution environments, that is emulators, virtual machines, interpreters etc. and a system that lets anyone develop and load games sounds like just that.

they have emulators in the app store now!

Here a couple of examples,

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2022/06/16/csharp-...

Or its beloved Xamarin,

" Rewrites never go as planned.

Xamarin.Forms turning into Maui was supposed to be a quick change, fueled by hopium so strong it defied gravity.

Instead, at best, it set it back 2-3 years."

https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1610665502598127616

You will find other juicy remarks, after the deadline to not speak about the acquisition expired.

I've been wanting to learn Godot for some time now. Being able to develop on the iPad is supercool (for side-project game devs). In addition, you can also now run Godot on the Meta Quest (https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/godot-game-engine/771...). Also, as Xogot runs on iPad and VisionOS can run iPad apps, it might even run there (haven't checked). That's a lot of fun platforms for playing around with it.

>There are two discords linked from the community section[1], one of them is listed under “Official communities” and the other under “User-supported communities”. The discord in question is the latter, the unofficial one.

I went and looked on the way back machine—that only became true in July of this year; prior to that, the user support community's Discord was marked as the official one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240629163842/https://godotengi...

Programming languages (IDEs) were always allowed as long as the code couldn't be downloaded from the internet. Local or cloud load/save is OK. An user copying it manually using a clipboard from a web page is OK as that's user doing. But direct downloading was a no-no. This was explained as to prevent any application from becoming AppStore-like.

There are some tricks, like using curl | sh approach by the user for UNIX-like environments, or similar things for Python IDEs. But again it is something that the user have to do and learn about it from an outside source.

I wonder if Apple will allow code downloading in the EU, now that they have to allow alternate app stores anyway.

Never attribute to respect or sincerity that which can be adequately explained by contractual terms.

... what's in it for Apple? It would just make their lives more complicated.

I still use .net :-)

But this port could not have been done with Xamarin due to the lack of SwiftUI integration.

The terms have changed gradually over the years and now we are boiling IDEs on the iPad.

My plan is to ship something that is both a great iPadOS app and operates within the confines of the AppStore restrictions.

I find restrictions as a powerful motivator to think about a problem differently. Lots of great art (and software) is great when it explores and brings to light what’s possible with the limitations of a medium.

They allow execution environments and have for many years. See pythonista etc

They haven’t allowed emulators till this year, but Xodot isn’t an emulator.

But what you’re likely thinking of with regards to execution is that they don’t allow creating new executable code. Ie no JIT or compilers, but interpreters are fine. Hence you can do GDScript (which runs in an interpreter like Python does) but you won’t be able to use the other language backends which compile down.

I wonder if Redot [1] is going to fork this project, as well.

[1]: https://github.com/Redot-Engine.

I love the spirit here, but the limitations on iOS are not the limitations of the medium. Mobile computing has lots of interesting and inspiring limitations, we don't need apple to draw artificial squircles we can't cross in an api.

Users seem to like those squircles, judging by the popularity of Apple products. It’s not a fun walled garden to be a creative developer in.

I don’t think this project is open source.

Do you think that blackeyeblitzar was mistaken about that being the official Discord because they were referring to an out of date version of the Community page dating back more than 4 months ago?

I think most people would have considered the "not official" discord the official one because it WAS when they joined it.... especially considering most of the moderation team behind it was the same team running this new "official" one.

The entire narrative of "oh well it's not the official one so we wash our hands of it" is incredibly weak to anyone who isn't trying to find excuses for the project considering it was the official one until recently and tons of people were shocked to find out it wasn't the official one anymore.

Fair enough, happy to be corrected on the matter.

20 years is a generation, however for many of us, Apple's walled garden was a refreshing concept versus the mobile operators gardens.

First of all, getting SDKs was akin to console devkits, back in 2004 getting a Symbian SDK was still a commercial only product for example, same for Windows CE/Pocket PC,...

Followed by about 80% tax, only to be listed on mobile phones magazines, with the SMS code to trigger the application download.

Hence why everyone rushed for the garden, it was indeed easier to be creative in Apple land.

Now 20 years later, there is another reality.

I would love to hear more. Always been a big fan of Miguel and his positive stance towards mending fences with MS. Sad to hear transitioning to the mother ship didn't work out.

Nobody who actually uses that discord server would have been shocked, since it was widely, repeatedly and loudly announced on it that they were moving to the official server months ago.

Is that significantly different now?

I could be wrong, but don’t you need to join the Apple developer program to get the sdk? It’s $100 a year, right?

I know you do to publish apps, which in the us is the only way to get apps to users.

> they don’t allow creating new executable code. Ie no JIT or compilers

The Metal compiler is embedded in the Metal runtime and runtime compilation of GPU kernels is part of the official API. So I'm not sure if Apple would actually prohibit JIT-ing GPU code.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if you could create a Metal IDE using nothing more than the Swift Treesitter module and a Metal definition for it. As of today, you can use the Swift Playgrounds app if you don't mind not having any compiler errors or warnings provided to you.

There are various shader exploration tools for iPad and Vision Pro.

Here’s one that might catch your fancy https://youtu.be/4TiBP0loC7s?si=HUNUSg0KMwRbdcK3

Very cool!