Porting to ARM-based devices

[MangoDragonHub]

Hello everyone,

Out of curiosity I wanted to know if there is an official way to export your Godot game to any ARM-based device natively from the Godot editor? Like for the Raspberry Pi, and other Linux Based ARM computers. I know it supports X11 and many other x86 devices and the export settings has native Android support but when it comes to any other ARM devices I keep seeing forums that you need to have an ARM build of the Godot editor to even export to that architecture.

[Calinou]

This is already tracked in a proposal: #988

Godot can already be compiled for Linux ARM platforms, but no official editor and export template binaries are provided yet. Providing such binaries is planned for a future version, but there's no ETA as it involves nontrivial changes to the build container system.

[Calinou]

I think it boils down to whether the Pinebook Pro has a complete (and fast) X11 setup available, or only a limited framebuffer.

[MangoDragonHub]

I'm assuming it probably does considering the chipset in that device, the RK3399s, and equivalents are used in a lot of Android SBCs. Whenever, I get far enough in development I'll see if I can get something similar enough or a get the PineBook Pro second-hand.

[ghost]

So I was just looking at this for the rpi4 because it actually has opengl es3 drivers but godot only runs on es2 on it because it uses desktop GL libraries on linux. I think to do arm releases right that would need to change, but I'm still a little lost looking around the build system still.

[Calinou]

Godot 3.x's GLES3 renderer is likely too demanding for a Raspberry Pi 4 (even overclocked). I'd recommend sticking to GLES2 there for performance reasons alone, since GLES2 performs better in simple scenes which you'll be running on a Raspberry Pi.

[ghost]

Interesting, thank you for that advice. I wasn't sure about how well it would work, just knew that the driver support was there.