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Defold: cross-platform game engine

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Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#81

Post by japhib »

bentt wrote: post #31

I remember when Unity first appeared and what it felt like to read its materials, its pitch. It was like... whoa, this might actually be something. This feels similar. Sometimes you can just tell by the communications and the spirit of the language that the team has the goods. The fact that they have such comprehensive multiplatform export right now is big. One of Godot's biggest hurdles has been console support. My…

They recently added C# support: https://forum.defold.com/t/defold-c-support/79479

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#82

Post by japhib »

xandrius wrote: post #62
bentt wrote: post #31

I remember when Unity first appeared and what it felt like to read its materials, its pitch. It was like... whoa, this might actually be something. This feels similar. Sometimes you can just tell by the communications and the spirit of the language that the team has the goods. The fact that they have such comprehensive multiplatform export right now is big. One of Godot's biggest hurdles has been console support. My…

Exactly, read Lua and got out instantly. Games are complicated beasts, something along the lines of C# help massively the development and the avoidance of bugs. Python, Script and Lua are not languages I'd wish to switch to from the coziness of C#. I'd consider Go or Java (although not as hip as it used to be).

If you just want static typing, you can write Typescript and compile to Lua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#83

Post by PolCPP »

ilariel wrote: post #57
echelon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an awesome license. More products should be source-available like this. This is what sustainable "equitable open source" looks like. It keeps the team that built the product able to monetize, but it does so without harming or killing the community. The community has full access to the code and can modify it, make money from products made with it, and can presumably take over if the originating organization di…

At least they mention that it is source-available, but they still mix "open source" into the mix on their site. It is a really nice and fair source-available license and there should be more of this, but a license like theirs also restricts what kind of software you can make in a rather harsh way. Since you can't commercialise game engine products and they are defined in a broad way. You could land in legal issues. G…

The only options i see are:

- Give the modding tools for free with the game (like many games do anyway). You're commercializing the game no the modding tools - Make the tools defold-free ? So it reads the game data but its not defold. - Tools for free but charge for support/warranty?, Clause 9 lets you sell support/warranty; you just can’t charge for the software license itself.

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#84

Post by japhib »

saejox wrote: post #74
tapoxi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot does support consoles, they just choose to move that to third parties. There's community Switch support if you're a registered Switch developer, and W4 Games licenses export plugins. One of the reasons for this is because console plugins can't be developed in the open like the rest of the engine, because the console SDKs are behind NDAs. It's a pretty ridiculous holdover from when consoles were more specialized…

i wish people would stop mentioning W4 Games as a porting option. their lowest revenue tier costs $2000 a year. most indie games sell a few hundred copies.

You'd be hard pressed to find console support for much less than that - compare it with Unity or GameMaker's console support tier and you'll find it's pretty similar.

It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#85

Post by japhib »

synergy20 wrote: post #50

is Teal widely used? https://github.com/teal-language/tl Teal to lua is what typescript to javascript

I tried to use Teal before and had some issues even getting it to compile ... but the Lua language server actually has pretty good type checking.

Another option is https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#86

Post by mtnygard »

tunaoftheland wrote: post #24

I've had a soft spot for defold, partly because they're unique in the gamedev space. For example, the GUI editor that is built-in is done in Clojure! https://github.com/defold/defold/tree/dev/editor (cljfx for the GUI, I am rooting for seesaw though :)) From what I understand it emerged from a gamedev studio from Sweden (King or something?) so there's commercial release pedigree there. I believe their console platfor…

It’s cool to see this mentioned. I worked on the editor back in the day. It’s actually the second IDE for Defold. The original one that we replaced was built on Eclipse.

A team of about 6 people replaced the IDE core and built a dozen tools over a year.

It was a fun project. Not many people can say they built a desktop gui with Clojure!

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#87

Post by mtnygard »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
tunaoftheland wrote: post #24

I've had a soft spot for defold, partly because they're unique in the gamedev space. For example, the GUI editor that is built-in is done in Clojure! https://github.com/defold/defold/tree/dev/editor (cljfx for the GUI, I am rooting for seesaw though :)) From what I understand it emerged from a gamedev studio from Sweden (King or something?) so there's commercial release pedigree there. I believe their console platfor…

If it is King, then it's got a huge (financial) backer; King is one of the most profitable game publishers thanks to e.g. Candy Crush that made their revenue jump from $62 million in 2011 to $1.88 billion in 2013. It was bought in 2016 by Activision Blizzard, which in turn was acquired by Microsoft in 2023. Ah, the wiki page also mentions the Defold engine, which was first developed in 2007 and acquired by King in 20…

AFAIK, King spun Defold back out as a foundation.

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#88

Post by aaroninsf »

Ask-HN:

Context:

Every time a game engine like this pops up I read through the comments noting other engines and various perspectives and criticisms (positive and negative).

I have a game-like music composition project I want to pick back up. Media-intensive with a rich isometric/2D environment, with lots of little animations, which need to be synchronized to perfectly-scheduled audio events.

I develop fully-feature prototypes in the past, most recently on iOS for iPad before there was iPadOS... but using Core libraries hit a performance wall on hardware of that era.

Question:

Who can I consult with up front to get good advice on what technology path to pursue, to realize my project?

WebGL/Webasm would be fine. Cross-platform console targets would be fine. iPadOS would be fine and best, gestures are a core part of the vision.

...and I have no idea where and how to find my way into this.

I follow some GameDev feeds and naturally what I read about is very capable application of engines/environments which are quite close to what I need, but which are (naturally) targetting game dev.

Say you wanted to sit down and make a rich visual sequencer with some DAW-like features? What's the right approach?

It's not a traditional DAW, it's much more about a rich tiled game-like UX; it's not a game, with levels, maps, and such... it's got elements of both. The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to graphical elements and UX and responsive to gesture in a way that's like game-level.

Any ideas welcome. I think I have a good (layperson's) understanding of the overal architecture I need; but I don't know how my conceptual map translates into different styles of game-engine or more general media-engines.

My hunch is my "solodev" state which was a blocker before when I had no time to quit the day job and learn eg. OpenGL for iOS, is significantly ameliorated today by code assistants... iff they are familiar with

Do Claude Code etc. know Unity dev? Engines like this one? I don't know! Naive.

Haaaaalp

Re: Defold: cross-platform game engine

#89

Post by Tepix »

rpdillon wrote: post #61
Tepix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems fair, but sadly not OSS. Which of their license changes makes you feel sad and why? Were you planning to sell their editor?

The current license makes it unclear whether it would be a violation to distribute a commercial game that has a built-in map editor.

You have have to write your own map editor if you want to sell it, yes.
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