I don't quite understand so I'll just invoke Cunningham's Law: Why couldn't the SFC, or whatever foundation springs up to run things, publish binary blobs for making builds? I don't see why the open source nature of the project would be an obstacle.

The console makers require that developers sign an NDA before gaining access to their API.

Why?

Why don't you ask them?

If I were to guess, I'd say it's to prevent both piracy as well as games being sold from 3rd party markets.

To make sure no one can make games for their platforms without their permission and agreeing to their terms. If the platform was open, anyone could make anything and sell it in any way they wanted - so how would they squeeze more money out of them for themselves?

If you look at the history of consoles, many are sold at very thin margins, or even at a loss, not even including R&D, distribution, etc. just purely from a component cost standpoint. They recoup these costs using revenue from the game sales and the online play features. It’s not a squeezing money kind of thing. For example, the next gen of consoles is probably going to be in the $500 range, and includes pcie4 speed 1tb SSDs. I bought one of these for my new machine and it was about $200 alone. Add in the processor, ram, motherboard, case, optical drive, etc. and these systems are not making tons of profit.

Presumably the console manufacturers would not allow this. They want more control than that and don't want licensees acting as a sort of sub-licensor and building things for people like this.

You have to sign agreements with the console manufacturers - they get to set any rules the market will support.

as someone who just picked up godot i really hope they eventually reach a point where console support is feasible.

I dont know if we're on the same page here. It isn't a question of engineering time. It's a legal problem. It's not going to become feasible in the way ordinary problems do.

There's a couple companies out there that will port your game to consoles for you. [1]

(1): http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/

If Godot becomes big, you can bet vendors would contact Godot to include support for their systems (under NDA).

The issue here is that Godot isn't someone you can contact to support their systems. It's an open source project. They either add it to the source, which they can't because of NDAs, or they point you to companies who have a track record of porting and publishing Godot games on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One, which they are currently doing:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

It's feasible that they could do the work themselves and only allow access to a branch or patches for console to folks who have signed the NDA. This is basically how Epic works with Unreal. The Unreal source code is available for anyone to look at on github, but it doesn't include any console-specific code.

FNA, Monogame, Heaps, Kha, and many other open source engines have closed source forks supporting consoles.

Open source projects can definitely be contacted in most cases (including Godot) and anybody can fork the project to support a given console. Vendors can publish such support under NDA.

Technically speaking, improvements to the Vulkan renderer like this are not beneficial to the two major consoles that do not bother supporting Vulkan. The console manufacturers need to get with the program if you want to have any chance of running cross-platform code on there. As long as most studios remain reliant on the small handful of middleware companies (Unreal, Unity) to supply these abstraction layers for them, then this likely won't change.

The Switch does support Vulkan but it still leads to the problem of the walled-garden and NDAs which has already been discussed here at length, and also prevents any further abstraction layers for consoles from being developed by anyone besides these approved middleware companies. If the open source aspect is important to you then I would suggest avoiding these walled-garden consoles completely.

Lightmapping is mostly a bunch of higher-level infrastructure that is mostly portable between rendering APIs, there is often some additional amount of work that has to be done per API but I generally expect it to be minimal.

I don't think the console manufacturers have many incentives to work too hard on supporting these shared APIs. Their business models make it much more valuable to provide higher performing and more specialized code that works better on their console. And that price generally ends up being pretty small and well worth it for a team maintaining their own engine. And that math only becomes more insignificant the more teams are switching to the main engines such as Unity and Unreal.

Of course lightmapping is just one part, but the major focus of the 4.0 release is the entirety of the Vulkan backend. There is a lot more code there than just this.

I don't think your second paragraph is quite true and it's only because Vulkan is already supported on one of the consoles (Switch) and has been promoted by them for years as a way to make it easier for PC developers to port their games. There are also things like MoltenVK (which was a prime motivator for Vulkan support in Godot) that prove that there is some demand AND that other companies are willing to pay the expense of maintaining it, so it's not something that has to cut into their business model or mess with other products either.

I'm actually not sure if Switch has a shippable Vulkan back-end. They've been saying they have Vulkan support for years, but at least 2 years ago there was no Vulkan support to speak of.

Even if it is now finally supported, most of the game developers I know of are using the NVN backend.

You can publish to consoles with Godot. The issue is that the console makers don't give anyone access to their API without being officially licensed developers (and signing an NDA) so there's no public export templates. However there are several companies that help with this and I believe the Godot devs do as well if you can prove you're a licensed developer.

Also, if there is enough of a market for it, someone can maintain a version of Godot as a company (like RedHat) and then you can use that version for consoles, although obviously at some cost. If Godot grows, that could be an interesting business for someone on HN.

I really like Godot. It's not as full featured as other engines but it feels very logical and clear.