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How to set up the Kotlin/JVM Godot engine on a Mac

/ 2 min read

thesis, java, kotlin

So I’m currently sitting and doing some pre-research for my master’s thesis. To be completely honest with you, the last time I touched anything Kotlin / Java related was almost 3 years ago. So I have zero clue about it. However, I probably need this tool to create some fancy stuff with it.

While setting up the Kotlin/JVM Godot environment I encountered some issues (mostly because I was really blind while reading the docs) which led to many crashes and some fruststrations. Therefore, I decided to write up a small step-by-step guide for setting up this nice tool on MacOS.

Installation

  1. Download the custom Godot engine provided by the project For that, you just go to the Releases-Section of the GitHub repository and download the MacOS editor from the “Assets” section.

  2. Make sure to set your JAVA_HOME variable in the .zshrc or the .bash_profile. You can find a Tutorial for that here.

  3. In order to be able to start your project directly from the Applications folder you have to set your path also in the launchctl You can do that by executing launchctl setenv JAVA_HOME </path/to/jdk>

Setting up the Godot Project

  1. For that you can basically follow this guide
  2. If you experience issues that Godot keeps asking for permissions for the Documents folder, try to move the entire project into your home directory.

Using Java for your Godot scripts

Luckily, you can also use Java out-of-the-box for your scripts. For that you simply create a java folder in your project (on the same level as the kotlin one) and write some Java Code.

However, you need to keep an eye on the syntax / API because it is slightly different to the Kotlin one. You can find an example for a Java script (not JavaScript!) here.

Last Notes

Although this project is really tiny at the moment I believe there is great potential in it. So feel free to check out their Docs and Discord-Channel 😊