Godot is a free, open source game engine, that can export to web, mobile, Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and, soon, several game consoles. For more information on Godot itself, see the main engine repository.
This snap provides a way to get Godot via snap insall, with the benefits
of a snap such as application sandboxing and dependency pinning.
Godot 3 and 4 are released in the same snap under different tracks. So Godot 4 is godot 4.x/beta
and Godot 3 is godot 3.x/[stable|beta]. The latest channel is not used as what should count as "latest"
is not clear given Godot 4 is close to release. Likely as 4 hits stable, the latest channel will mirror the 4.x
channel.
Since Snaps are sandboxed, Godot opens its own apparent home folder from within the Snap.
From the perspective of a user, this should be under $HOME/snap/godot/common/ -
if you need to add assets to Godot, they should also be there since
Godot can't "see" outside its environment.
- Certain game controllers are unlikely to work, this is due to a lack of custom
udevrule support insnapd. This should not apply to exported games run outside the Snap environment, but running a preview build from within the editor is unlikely to provide the desired results until this is sorted out (likely within the next 6 months, it's on the roadmap). - Some GDNative/GDPlugin extensions may not work properly if they require dynamic libraries
that do not exist in the Snap environment. For best results, statically link your plugins where possible.
If needed, you should also be able to place the
.sofiles next to your plugin in the$HOME/snap/godot/common/tree and manually set yourLD_LIBRARY_PATHto point there. However, in some limited cases (particularly if you link against graphics APIs), you may end up with a version conflict if the libraries used when building are not exactly the same as those in the snap environment. - This may or may not complicate certain specific workflows unless you do some tinkering,
(untested, but pottentially various Godot-Blender tools, or VS Code Godot integration etc),
as both of these programs as Snaps means they inhabit their own sandboxed environment and may not be able to communicate via direct API without using either the shell or specificdbusinterfaces.
To mirror the current state of the Godot engine, the master branch hosts the Godot 4 snapcraft.yaml
and the Godot 3 snap is on the 3.x-stable branch. In the future, beta and edge branches
may be added for both Godot 3 and 4 (depending on whether 3.x is dropped and whether
it becomes easier to automatically discover stable and beta git commits like there are
with tags and branches for stable). Realistically, the only meaningful change to the snapcraft.yaml files
is the git tag to pull the godot part from.
To build as a developer, simply run snapcraft, and then install the
resulting snap with snap install --dangerous godot-<version>._<arch>.snap
(e.g. instance godot-4.0.0_amd64.snap).