Decentraland on expansion spree; pushing mobile and VR capabilities

Following the DAO grant and the Protocol Team’s testing of other game engines, Decentraland will soon be available on more platforms. This will help to strengthen its future foundations and foster business-oriented ingenuity.

As the year 2024 approaches, the primary goal of the decentralized foundation is to deliver a new and robust desktop customer designed in unity. This will increase the possibilities while also paving the way for Decentraland to grow across alternative platforms such as mobile and VR.

Decentraland is an open-source, decentralized, and community-oriented platform that gives everyone the ability to contribute to the general evolution of the virtual social global platform. Securing this ability, the protocol team plans to build the Decentralized Explorer in complementary tech stacks and offer new growth opportunities.

Following comprehensive research on different alternative engines, the protocol team decided to construct a decentralized mobile customer in Godot, an open source engine, and a desktop customer in Bevy, another open-source engine. Decentraland is well-prepared for the future thanks to its open protocol and the new Unity desktop client being built by the Foundation. Additionally, there are numerous engines that can operate the Explorer in the long run.

Initially, the Three.js Java Script 3D library was employed by Decentraland to render its virtual environment. In 2018, the project transitioned to Babylon.js, and ultimately, the development team settled on Unity.

With an open protocol, decentraland is able to operate on a variety of technology platforms. The protocol team had already established a Unity-oriented clientele, and research was undertaken on two alternative engines. They were called Babylon.js and Bevu.js.

The Babylon stage was halted after a proper proof of concept, and the team shifted to Godot. Since the beginning, the team had incorporated the Rust programming language from Bevy into the Godot project. The Godot engine provided intriguing alternatives for interacting with Decentraland, such as compatibility with all available mixed reality headsets.

With the release of Godot’s editor’s code, possibilities for improving every aspect of the engine become available. With SDK 7, one might even include a Decentraland editor.

When the new Explorer is set, it is necessary to review the benefits of having more than one consumer. The team’s research is primarily experimental in nature. For the time being, Unity is the fundamental engine, and the foundation is looking for a production-ready customer.

The protocol team’s next step is to improve Web3 exposure so that players may be identified without having to use an external wallet but can still connect with one.

A beta release of both Explorers, mobile and desktop, could occur in the middle of 2024.