GodotSteam Beginning-of-year Updates
Hey gang! Starting off the year with a fresh update with the all-new Godot 4.6 and a bit for Valve's upcoming Steam Frame. Not too long ago, Valve updated their docs for the Steam Frame which lists Godot as one of three engines for OpenXR support and briefly mentions GodotSteam as supporting Android and Linux ARM64, which it did not... until now.
To actually make this true, we are rolling out GodotSteam 4.17.1 in both the usual precompiled bundle and GDExtension fashion. This includes said Android and Linux ARM64 variants with matching precompiled editors too. The actual patch itself is relatively small though. The Server version has also received a quite small bump too for these new Godot 4.x versions.
Goodnight, Discord!
Last year there were a few mentions that if/when Discord decided to IPO, the community would get moved off their servers. Well, that time has finally come as Discord allegely plans to do so in early March. In preparation, I've started up a new Stoat community and IRC channel for GodotSteam with plans to shutter our Discord presence. Going to aim for mid-March at this point. Hope to see you in better places!
I had previously posted about using Matrix but mostly due to user error (clearly me), I have abandoned this plan. Taking down the now pretty broken Matrix server is rather difficult due to how Matrix works so you may want to avoid any links that take you there as it will be removed as soon as possible.
GodotSteamKit Round... Something
So I've talked off and on again about GodotSteamKit; working on it then deciding to shelve it. However, funding open-source projects is really hard to do. People love using it but few actually support it. So time to dust off the GodotSteamKit plan again to see if it is possible to raise more funds for the general GodotSteam work!
What was GodotSteamKit again, you ask? An upgraded version of GodotSteam that includes:
- Overhauled the standard codebase
- Converter for updating any GDScripts from normal GodotSteam code
- Remove some dictionaries in favor of specialty nodes and objects
- Starter-kit-esque scenes
- Additional tools like Steam uploader, VDF editors, etc.
The plan is to roll our the first two at some point soon-ish to our current sponsors and get some feedback about how it is all working. Then probably launch it on Itch.io since I can't quite think of another good place to put it.
Over time, different parts will be released to the wider public as free updates to the main GodotSteam project; similar to how some other open-source projects I've seen.
The plan to keep the whole thing closed-source is still in action though.
More on all that in February!
Tutorials And More
Last but not least, there are two updates to our tutorial section: Rich Presence and Workshop/UGC. The Rich Presence one is nothing majorly new, just a little housekeeping to bring it up to speed with the others. However, the Workshop/UGC one actually has a lot of new information which was pulled from the now-public Skillet UGC Editor. This covers creating, editing, and viewing items but not using them just yet as we haven't gotten to that part in Skillet's slow development. But expect an update soon!
As mentioned in a previous post, I'm going to spend most of the time now working on GodotSteamKit and more resources.
Until then!
Gramps