Godot and Blender game development on a Chromebook

hello everybody I just wanted to make a quick video um I've been asked the question a couple times recently about some game development on a Chromebook and in particular about installing Godot on a Chromebook and there's nothing special about it but I thought I would go through the steps anyway just to uh have it out there because for some reason it's been asked a couple times lately it does require the Linux desktop app so if you're on a Chromebook that's like locked down by a school or something it is kind of restricted there that's not a Chromebook thing that's a school thing um like I work at a college and the college gave me a very powerful Windows machine but I can't really do anything on it except check my email I often think they could have saved a fortune by buying less powerful machines if the only thing every employee at the college is allowed to do is check our email but um that's for a different department than mine but if it's your own Chromebook and you have access to it uh your first thing you want to do is make sure the Linux environment's on and depending on when your Chromebook was made it should have been turned on by default uh lately it's been turned on by default or I should say it might have been turned turned on by default but uh if you go to settings and scroll down to Advanced and under developers you'll see this Linux development environment and depending on when the Chromebook was made there might be a button here that says turn on just click that button and the defaults will probably be good the only thing you would really change is how much setting how much storage space of your hard drive is dedicated to the Linux machine but the rest of the regular storage space is still accessible it's a subsystem sort of thing but once you turn it on and it takes about five minutes to set it up you'll have a terminal I have it in the task menu but I'll go ahead and search for it because if you just turned it on it won't be there so you'll search for terminal and that uh it'll open up a bad shell so we have a the bat shell here to do all the regular Linux application stuff Chrome OS is just a Linux application so we can always get back to that background and do stuff but they put a desktop here so we don't have to go into that background when to do the Linux thermal stuff so you want to set this up and then we just need to go download Godot and I'm gonna go ahead and take it a step further so just do a search for Godot and write it right there on the home page you should see download latest so when I'm making the video 4.1 is the latest so if we download that and it should recognize if you're on if you're using your Chromebook it should recognize that you're on a Linux system so if you're downloading it somewhere else uh and it tries to download Windows or something just switch to the Linux download and choose the latest one should be fine so while that's downloading I want to go ahead and download something else as well because godot4 there were some really nice improvements there and one of them is full integration with blender so the sort of de facto standard for open source 3D modeling uh which if you're wanting to get into game development you probably want to make some nice models and blender has much better tools for making models than Godot does so if we go uh just go to blenders page again just search for it and when you hit download it should again recognize that you're on the Linux system if it looks for a different one just the button down below will have the links to the other versions uh download the uh the latest Linux version 3.6 works fine on a Chromebook so I'm go ahead and download that it's kind of a big file it might take a second but uh shouldn't take too long and both of these are essentially ready to run so there's some cleanup steps we can do all right that's downloaded so I'll go ahead and close these and I'll go over to the file explorer and in downloads folder there's this zip folder just a regular dot zip that has the Godot stuff in it if we go in there you'll see there's only one file and this is the latest stable version of Godot just go in here and copy this so I'll hit Ctrl C to copy and paste that I'll just use the home directory on Linux they're probably better places it's kind of a large file after we unzip it it's compressed quite a bit it's a whole bunch of text files a whole bunch of code a whole bunch of C plus plus code that's been compressed so it compressed very very nicely so once we uncompress it and go to copy it it takes a moment and while that's going we do need to also unzip that uh the blender file so the blender came down as atar dot XZ so I'm just going to copy that whole tar file hit Ctrl C or could drag and drop it I'm just going to select it hit Ctrl C and over in the Linux folders uh paste that in and on a Chromebook since it is a Linux system we can just double click on the tar file and it'll automatically open up for us I'm going to go into the terminal because it's a little bit quicker if we just go extract it like normal looks like all those messages are finished so everything's copied over so if I list out what's in this folder uh there's the Godot version and blender we need to extract that real quick so it's dot XZ so we do need special instructions so tar Dash XF is all we need if it's x and z it'll automatically handle the compression from the Z when extracted that's what that extension means so Dash SXF and then the name of it which I'll just copy and paste because it's quite a big name there and that should extract the folder there's a lot of stuff in there so it'll take a moment to extract but it shouldn't take too long um yeah I didn't well that's taken longer than I was thinking and the screen recorder I'm using doesn't have a pause thing but blender is really nice 3D modeling software uh Godot has several rendering pipelines available good0 4.1 has a Vulcan pipeline which you have to have a GPU to run some Chromebooks have a GPU so if you have a GPU you can use that but if you don't have a GPU you might need to use a slightly different format that's taking a long time maybe I should have went in the other way in that oh maybe nope it's still going okay there it goes so now that we have that file extracted um we can remove that zip folder we don't need that anymore remove recursively copy and paste that big long name in there so now we just have the two applications we need um so I'll go this is blue color coded in um your machine might be a little bit different but blue indicates a folder here on mine so I'll navigate into that folder that we unzipped copy that and paste that in and when we list things out you'll see in here there's a file called blender launcher so that's the that's the one we'll need to launch blender we'll get to that in just a second so if I go back up to the home directory and this is currently just a file if I list it out with Dash l so we see the permissions we'll see in the Godot it has read and write permission for the owner which is me and then read permissions for the public and read permissions or read permissions for a group and read permissions for the General Public we need to change that to executable permissions if you haven't done Linux permissions before we had three numbers together so a four for execute a four for execute a two for reading and a one for writing so we want to add execute to the user so that we need a seven there and we probably probably want anybody in the same group any user in the same group as us to be able to execute so I'll add four to the uh to the one there and get a five oh sorry right is two and read is one and I'll go ahead and put execute here so um I'll do change mode to change those permissions and I want to put 755 to that file which I'll just copy and paste the name because it's kind of a lot there so change permissions to read write and execute uh read and execute and read and execute so now if we list that out see it's green so that means it should be ready to run so dot indicate the current directory and in our current directory there is that folder file it should still be on the clipboard and when we run that the ghetto engine should start up pretty quick um we don't need to go check out the asset library for now we can just go create a new project I'll just go with that default name oh whoops I'm going to click this button create a folder with that name and the one thing we do want to change is you want to switch to compatibility so forward plus has some really nice rendering pipelines so it moved to a Vulcan rendering pipeline instead of an opengl rendering pipeline um you do have to have a GPU or at least something like the Intel integrated GPU in order to run the Vulcan pipeline but if you switch to compatibility mode you will it'll work fine so just create a new project switch to compatibility mode and hit create and edit and that'll open up Godot with a new project and while that's opening I'll go ahead and open blender I'm gonna ignore this warning um this is actually kind of a nice thing I was going to show here in a moment so it says blend blend file import is enabled with the project settings but it's not configured so when I check this earlier uh oh it is here now so to set that and get rid of that warning we need to point at where blender's at so there's two settings one of them well we saw the warning so it's obviously there already under project settings if you go to the general Tab and scroll down to um file system but I don't see it on here oh there it is file system and import there's a checkbox to enable blender so blender is fully integrated here we don't have to do any cumbersome exports and then re and then Imports into different software uh we can just put our blender files right here in the project make sure that checkbox is on and under editor settings if you scroll down to file system here which this one's in alphabetical order so file systems near the top under import it there's this thing Linder 3 path so just select that and navigate to where blender is imported um so I need to go up a directory so there's blender so I'll go in here and here's the launcher so we want to point at this folder that has all of those blender files so right in that folder that we unzip or unzip from the tar file so we'll select that and that'll get rid of that warning um and after you change the editor settings you do need to close the editor so this this is the editor um settings go to the configuration file so this is just this same message about this little um what's in the editor not that setting we just changed so I'll just go with the don't save um some warnings and things are going to show up most of them are like these the relate to things that require a GPU you'll probably see that on a Chromebook but not a big deal uh you'll notice it still thinks it's running so push control C when you're whoops control C to cancel uh to cancel the current running operation now we can just restart that and it's probably a good idea to rename those things I probably should have done it already um if I list that out there's this big long name so not a bad idea to rename it to Jessica dough that's a lot easier to type I'm going to keep copying and pasting but you can rename it probably should have renamed this before pointing the file path at it because that can cause problems to rename it now but um or put something put a shortcut an alias or something so that you can type a shorter word but we've got that setting so I'm going to hit Ctrl copy that name and current directory dot for the current directory a slash for in our current directory and paste that in there and it'll start you know back up and we can open the project again and now everything should be set up uh and there's different errors so these errors have to do with the GPU so texture allocation cache week um we can't cache our textures so if we have if we're going for like trying to get photorealism um it's a little bit hard if we haven't if we don't have it halfway loaded already uh this is a really Advanced feature that uh we can work we can live without um again with the GPU we can uh um it gets into the linear algebra of how the thing three dimensions are actually displayed and we can move it to an array which makes it a little bit quicker and then we can cache those arrays which makes it very quick and that's how we get some parts for the photo realism so uh basically those warning those errors are saying that you won't be able to get all the way to photorealism on the Chromebook uh which isn't really a problem because you could write all the code for it here and then run that on another computer that does have a GPU and it would work fine so here's our thing I'm going to go ahead and open blender um so that's taking up this terminal still running so I'm going to open a new tab in the terminal and still in that same directory so I'm going to chain change directory into that blender one which it would have been a really good idea to rename that to probably just blender instead of all of that stuff and then in here we have blender launcher we can type that one and it's already in green so it already has executable permissions I'll list those out blender launcher we already have looks like seven two seven two five permissions but um we have executable permissions on it to run that there's x's in there so if we do dot slash blender Dash launcher it'll pop up blender here um hopefully it won't take too long it's already taking longer than I was expecting there it goes um quick setup uh yeah English looks good select with the mouse key oh shortcuts of blenders I guess there is a shortcut there already um defaults are good General setup um I'm gonna hit a to select everything and shift backspace is delete or sorry not shift backspace everything button the one with the magnifying glass search button the everything button and backspace is delete on a Chromebook um then I'll just add add some sort of mesh maybe a UV sphere and scale it along the y-axis a little bit so it's not a perfect sphere and we'd build our nice fancy models here probably come over to something like edit and preferences and turn on landscapes if we go to add-ons search for landscape and hit that check box and then we have a insert a landscape button I'm just going to go with a a stretched out Sphere for this one so when I go to save it Ctrl s to save it and here's new blink that new game project we just created so I'm going to go in there right in the game project and create a new folder for I'll call it lens that seems like a good name for it then in that folder I'll just leave it Untitled that's fine this is a quick demo we'll save it there right in the game project so when we go back over to Godot I notice it automatically jumps to the importing assets and should just take a couple seconds and now we have this Blends folder and our blender file stay stored right here so if we create a new 3D scene there's our basic node we can drag this up here and make that a child of the node so notice there's no cumbersome exporting in a different format and then re-importing and we just do blender directly right in here and bring our models right into our game um I'm gonna run this scene oh wait there's no light in the scene cancel that I usually prefer to make the light but I'll just add the uh the testing light and environment here so we can see stuff oh we won't be able to see anything will we um add a camera 3D and now we now we can see now we'll be able to see stuff which way is that pointing um preview mode okay yeah so we can see something that way just for a quick demo oh gotta save the scene sure the default name is probably good and when it runs we can see our 3D model from blender the environment the lighting the shading is coming through um I didn't do anything with the textures or anything with materials or textures we have some but those warnings earlier were indicating that uh we can't quite get to photorealism on it on a Chromebook that's what those warnings over here were we we can't cash our materials or we can't cash our textures so it does take full time to load them and we can't we can't use arrays between to move things from the CPU to or from Ram into the GPU so we can't get quick enough to do photorealism but we could write the code for it here and then do a build on a machine that can so that's really not even a problem and then you can just do the normal Godot game development to uh build your game on a Chromebook if that's the machine you have so you can see there's nothing nothing exceptional about it as long as you're not on a Chromebook that's locked down by a high school or something but that's that's locked down by the high school that's not a Chromebook thing that's a school thing I have the same thing with the computer the college issued me for to use in my office that I can't really do anything on it except check my email so something schools like to do but if you have your own Chromebook and have permission to actually do stuff on it game development on the Chromebook is no problem that question has been thrown my way a couple times recently so I thought I'd make a quick video to see that um hope you found that helpful and when you close out of these again just one last quick reminder close that I'm gonna close out a blender and over in the terminal notice blender did fully close but oh whoops cancel uh over in the other tab it still thinks it's doing something so make sure you hit Ctrl C which is the command to cancel in any terminal bash Powershell Z fish whatever terminal we're writing our uh uh our commands and control C is canceling that so make sure you do that at the end of the note otherwise um yeah you can see it's straightforward uh hopefully you found this helpful if you had that question I just thought I'd make the video because uh that question was unexpectedly thrown my way a couple times recently so thank you

Channel: MrCsfrancis

Views: 2

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Id: FlQgwkG-nRI

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2023