We keep our word of donating back to the Godot Engine project anything that can be legally open sourced, so our first donation will be an implementation of a Direct3D 12 rendering device. This work was written by the very talented Pedro J. Estébanez, and it aims to bring more compatibility and platforms to Godot 4.0, including:
- Microsoft Windows (what this code donation currently supports).
- Windows Store (UWP).
- Windows on ARM.
- Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK).
- Xbox (which can’t be supported officially by Godot due to console NDAs, but for which Direct3D 12 support is essential).
The different Windows platforms were already supported by Godot using the Open Source Vulkan and OpenGL specifications. But Direct3D is Microsoft’s own graphics specification and supporting it would be beneficial for all the aforementioned platforms.
This donation takes the form of a pull request to Godot’s GitHub repository, so the Godot contributors can consider it for inclusion (as well as give us feedback). If there is consensus on whether this should be an officially supported feature, it should be merged for Godot 4.0.
We hope that others can also take advantage of this code, as well as also contribute to its improvement. The beauty of Open Source is that we all contribute towards the common good, and we all benefit from it.
Link to the pull request with more information: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/64304