Godot by default does not support consoles. Yes, you can to employ another company to port it for you, but that is a no go for me. UE4 on the other hand you can do it all yourself once you get the developer kit and access (legally) to the platform of your choice.
On the other hand you can easily do mobile with Godot.
I'm curious because i'm dabbling in some gamedev and wanting to eventually ship mobile and console. I'm more focused on bleeding edge tooling though, Rust gamedev specifically, but i'm curious if the reasons Godot doesn't ship to console also means any Rust project won't be able to ever, either.
Is there something preventing opensource lowbudget projects from shipping to console? Are you forced to go UE4/etc if you want to ship consoles?
* Godot dev team isn't a commercial entity with console development license agreements.
* Even if they were, the console support couldn't be truly Open Source due to licensing & NDA agreements with the console manufacturers.
* There are third parties who have ported Godot to consoles who may work with you port your own Godot game.
* You could always port it yourself.
Another aspect that they don't mention is that for the Godot dev team themselves to support consoles they'd essentially have to create an entire parallel development infrastructure (repo, issue tracking, CI etc etc) per console to maintain the NDA confidentially requirements.
In regard to Rust, they were another example I mentioned up thread about this very situation:
"""
The situation is also the same for other FLOSS projects, e.g. the Rust language, where the issues tracking game console support basically say "if you have the ability to develop for (current) game consoles, you also know we can't talk about it here where others aren't under manufacturer NDA":
https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/issues/90
https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem/issues/18
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/jtqgn4/q_feasibility_...
"""
So, the "something" that is "preventing opensource lowbudget projects from shipping to console" is manufacturer license agreements/NDAs that are the antithesis of & a barrier to cross-company Open Source development. :)
[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
Console SDK seems to be not compatible with open source
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
It is another, smaller engine. I would say less featureful than Godot, but I imagine there are some overlapping use-cases?
Ed: and for something quite different - dragon ruby seems a lot of fun (not free, not open source, though): https://dragonruby.org/
And, yeah, that's fair enough--although I imagine if you offered one of the companies enough money they might be willing to license their port under similar terms to those Epic offers UE4 console support under. :D
(And given at least two companies have apparently ported Godot so far, porting it oneself is presumably also an option & one would have full source to work with.)
