Can someone give me more technical info instead of their propaganda video?
Don't know much yet, but: their editor is Eclipse-based. The scripts are Lua-based and can be cross-compiled.
Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#32Is this actually legal on iOS? I thought the App Store banned Lua code from being retrieved and executed on demand over the Internet.
First of all, it couldn't possibly be illegal.
Second, apparently Apple now allow interpreters, just not JITs.
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#33Someone should make an OpenGL ES 3.0 engine that works on all of these platforms by default: Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/WebGL (or Native Client, at least). I think it would be very popular in a year or two. I've been enjoying indie "mobile" games for PC's a lot more than AAA type games lately, because they are easy to get into and fun. They seem to focus more on game-play than "regular" PC game developers do.
Unity3D is pretty much just that.
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#34Someone should make an OpenGL ES 3.0 engine that works on all of these platforms by default: Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/WebGL (or Native Client, at least). I think it would be very popular in a year or two. I've been enjoying indie "mobile" games for PC's a lot more than AAA type games lately, because they are easy to get into and fun. They seem to focus more on game-play than "regular" PC game developers do.
Moai?
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#35We are currently in a public beta phase. We are aware of that the
web-site is really lacking a lot of information but we've been focusing on the product. Please post your questions here
http://defold.userecho.com and we'll try to answer as quick as we can.
It's also possible to post privately there.
Thanks!
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does it differ from Marmalade or any of the other Lua-based game engines?
I haven't used Marmalade, but after browsing through their site it looks like it's an SDK that you code against through Visual Studio or XCode.
Marmalade has Lua bindings as well. Maybe a better example would have been Moai (I think that was what I was originally thinking but got my wires crossed).
(There are a number of game engines out there that say "here, write all your stuff in Lua!". I find they're generally a bad fit for the projects I work on because I expect a level of structure in my work environment that is actively difficult to build with any of the ones I've seen. Always looking, though, because rewriting the universe sucks.)
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#37It would be interesting to see someone compare this with the Unity Game engine. Also I think there should be atleast a handful of screenshots on their website, to give their prospective users an idea of what it looks like, before downloading.
Thanks for the feedback, we obviously need to improve the amount of info on the site. I would say the biggest pros compared to Unity is that you can change your games while they run on your mobile devices, without needing to rebuild/restart which gives an iteration-cycle of about 1 second. We have also specialized the toolset of 2D (tiled graphics etc), but the engine is 3D behind the scenes. We are a service so the pricing is completely different. The biggest con is of course that Unity has been around for much longer so they have a bigger feature set, larger community and proven technology. But we will get there in time. :)
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#38No in-game screenshots? There should be 100s of them, with a JS carousel highlighting the 5 pretties ones... tsk, tsk.
Good point, we should show plenty more things on the site. The problem right now is that we are so fresh that we have little content to show. As people start releasing their games we will add screenshots.
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#39Somewhat offtopic - the logo has a strong correlation with the Adidas mark. This may cause you a headache further down the road, perhaps sooner than you realize.
Hehe, a few of us thought that too once we had the logo in-place. We hoped no one else would make that association, we were obviously wrong. :) Another fun fact, our favicon on the site is almost identical to the new Microsoft logo, but we had it first. :)
Re: Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine
#40Would be nice to see some examples of completed games on the site, even if they're just YouTube walk throughs.
I agree, but think the issue is slightly deeper. The branding lays the sass / pass / social elements on a little too thick for my taste. I immediately get the sense that this software is limited compared to a 'hard core' game engine. I'm sure that's not the case, but the visuals seem to belie this.
Very true, we wanted the web design to welcome people not accustomed to game dev, but we might have pushed it a bit too far. The software is surprisingly unlimited in what you can do with it, it's basically a very fast generic simulator of interactive real-time applications. It makes very few assumptions about your games. E.g. you can script the rendering pipeline exactly as you want it and update it in real-time while the game is running on your phone. The live update stuff works for almost every asset, scripts, shaders, etc.