A while ago I posted a blog post talking about AR and pirates. Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have been granted a workplace at the Brighton Fuse Box, where all sorts of artists and developers work on their AR and VR projects. I’ve spent the first couple of weeks trying to not look too bemused when people start saying technical stuff about shaders. I’ve also been figuring out what I want to do with the opportunity and it looks like Godot’s recent improved support for OpenVR has coincided nicely with me actually making something (rather than thinking about making something in-between paid work, as is usually the case).

The first milestone I’m heading for is to get a decent looking environment built using hand drawn assets. Then I’ll be looking to implement Godot’s OpenVR plugin to make a very simple virtual setting. I’m hoping I’ll be getting some collaboration on this. At this stage I have no idea if the idea will be successful, but I’ve spent a fun Friday afternoon making some assets and sticking them in the Godot Engine. Below is a very short (and a trifle dull) video of me testing texture sizes but hopefully things will get more interesting as the project continues over the next few weeks.

Why use Godot? Why not use Unity3D instead? After all, the latter is fast approaching the status of Industry Standard when it comes to game, AR and VR dev (at least it is around here). I can’t really point to a better reason than I really like Godot, it’s editor and it’s approach. I like that it’s open source and that using it doesn’t commit you to a private company’s business structure and release schedule. Of course, there are often frustrations when using relatively young, open source tools but so far it’s all good. Next time I post about this I hope it will be something more substantial.

Pirates FTW