Add tvOS (Apple TV) support

[AdriaandeJongh]

Describe the project you are working on

A sequel to Hidden Folks, and various spinoffs of Hidden Folks, all with potential to go to Apple Arcade (like its predecessor).

(Some context: I have two games in Apple Arcade, Hidden Folks+ and wurdweb, both of which are a major source of income for me and my collaborators.)

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

Apple Arcade has two types of games: App Store Greats (direct 'ports' of versions already found on the (Mac) App Store) and Arcade Originals: games of which its development is funded by Apple. The latter comes with a slew of requirements I can't specify here due to having signed an NDA, but looking at every Arcade Original on Apple Arcade, you will find that with only a few exceptions they support iOS, macOS, tvOS, and increasingly visionOS.

Currently, Godot lacks the ability to export to tvOS, and this weakens any game I may pitch to Apple Arcade representatives. My business instinct is that Apple higher-ups won't give me an easy 'yes' when I pitch a game with partial support to their platform.

I spoke briefly with @stuartcarnie who told me Apple TV support was on his mind, but I wanted to make this proposal either way to highlight and explain my needs.

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

Add support to export Godot games to Apple Arcade. This would include support for some platform specific stuff such as:

• support for input from the Apple TV remote.
• support for the weird tvOS app icon format.
• … and probably a lot more hardcore technical things I am not aware of.

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

I don't know anything about c++ nor how platforms can technically be supported. I suspect there's a huge overlap between iOS, macOS, visionOS, and by extension tvOS support – I recall having seen some apple_embedded code floating around, which probably lays a lot of the groundwork for supporting tvOS. But again: I have no idea.

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

It can't.

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

I don't know whether the features required to run Godot on Apple TV can be added to the project as a plugin, but I suspect not.

[Calinou]

This was attempted in godotengine/godot#58977 but wasn't merged in the end. It would need to be redone from scratch at this point, using the same codebase as the Apple Embedded system used for the visionOS platform.

Note that I labeled this proposal with platform:ios and platform:visionos for easier searching, as tvOS is closer to iOS/visionOS than macOS in terms of feature set.

[Ivorforce]

Adding support for tvOS would be fairly niché: Even though Adriaan quoted some good reasons for us to have it in principle, the vast majority of users won't benefit from support for the platform. So the implementation would probably have to be fairly simple to be added into and maintained by Godot.

The changes made by @rsanchezsaez recently for Apple Vision Pro might help with this actually; as Calinou said tvOS would probably use the "Apple Embedded" framework they set up, which might make it easier to implement than godotengine/godot#58977.

[AThousandShips]

Related:

• Implement Apple TV support #224

[stuartcarnie]

As noted by others, tvOS support will require significantly less work with the improvements by Ricardo.

I have already updated (and simplified) the build containers to use the combined "Apple Embedded" framework, so will only require minimal changes to the build scripts themselves to generate a tvOS binary, which is based on iOS.

SDL already supports the AppleTV Remote, and so once we update iOS to use SDL (which we will), that too should become a free addition.

I don't imagine Godot needs specific support for the icon format, but perhaps @AdriaandeJongh can provide some more info on what that might mean?

[paulocoutinhox]

Hi,

The tvOS is too much close from iOS. I added support for AppleTV in other project:
https://github.com/axmolengine/axmol/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Apaulocoutinhox+is%3Aclosed

The build system is the same, only need change platform, version etc.

The images is different because it is not rectangle, it has specific size:

On Unity the interface for AppleTV icons is this:

and

and the Splash:

Im here to help in something. Thanks.

[AdriaandeJongh]

@stuartcarnie design guide & some of the specifications of tvOS icons can be found on Apple's documentation here, but you'll find all of the specs in the AppIcon asset in Xcode when you enable the tvOS platform.