[HN Gopher] Defold: cross-platform game engine
___________________________________________________________________
Defold: cross-platform game engine
Author : xd
Score : 316 points
Date : 2025-04-18 08:15 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (defold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (defold.com)
| sylware wrote:
| Hopefully their build scripts are sane for native elf/linux
| support:
|
| * -static-libgcc (-static-libstdc++ if c++).
|
| * glibc ABI selection, see binutils documentation, VERSION
| related page, the second part of this page. This must include the
| glibc internal symbols. It easy to check the proper ABI with
| tools like readelf (the VERSION name part), which will tell you
| everything.
|
| * dynamic loading with fallbacks of all system interface shared
| libs.
|
| That said, it is exactly the same for the other OSes, this is all
| about abstraction via tables of functions.
| landsman wrote:
| Scripting in Lua sounds good.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| For small scripts. Lua is a huge minefield
| noodletheworld wrote:
| That seems kind of unfair.
|
| There are things that aren't great about lua, and I'm not
| going to pretend they're not. buuuut...
|
| - It's really perfectly ok if you use competently.
|
| - There are large complex systems and games built using it
| (eg. factorio) that show that scaling it _is_ both pragmatic
| and possible.
|
| - It has a big active community.
|
| When you compare it some other scripting solutions (boo,
| unityscript) that were just incompetently done, or
| mystifyingly deciding that writing your own language is the
| solution (jai, gdscript), I feel you have to admit it's a
| reasonably pragmatic choice.
|
| There aren't a lot of other languages that embed as a
| scripting layer the same way that lua does, with the same
| performance.
|
| Many candidates are either very hard to work with embedded
| (python) or simply lack any feasible way to possible embed
| them as a runtime scripting layer (go, zig, c, etc).
|
| Maybe there's a future for WASM scripting layers in games,
| but for now, I certainly haven't seen it done well.
|
| I can confidently say: Lua, the language, is not a minefield.
| Not to me. Not to you. Not to anyone.
|
| Some projects expose a lua scripting API that _is_ a
| minefield; ...but those two things are not the same thing,
| and by all accounts (I haven 't used it personally, but just
| idly reading the forums) the defold scripting layer seems
| fine to most people.
| chickensong wrote:
| FWIW, Factorio is primarily C++, with Lua for mods and map
| editor.
| britzl wrote:
| https://blog.luden.io/what-do-i-think-about-lua-after-
| shippi...
| zenkey wrote:
| After spending time with Cursor/Junie/Copilot etc., game engines
| are starting to feel slow and behind the curve. I'd love to see
| faster adoption and deeper LLM integration (as native features,
| not just some random third-party plugins). Whoever builds the
| first "Cursor for games" is going to disrupt the market.
| cheschire wrote:
| If Unity ever wanted to regain market cap, now's the time. The
| solution seems obvious from my armchair.
| blensor wrote:
| I am rooting for Godot here because it has a human readable
| scene file format.
|
| So when you have an AI agent modifying your project you can
| actually understand what it did, vs. the unity yaml based
| format that is mostly unreadable.
| KronisLV wrote:
| The JetBrains Rider IDE also works pretty well with Unity.
|
| Wonder if their Junie tool will support C# soon, the current
| features for other languages are already cool:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
|
| (I got access to it cause I have the all products pack,
| pretty good so far)
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| The problem with Unity is not their marketshare of game
| developers (which they have in spades), but rather their
| market share of ads which they completely missed out on.
|
| Game developers don't bring nearly as much revenue as ad
| serving, which is a sad commentary on the reality of software
| development and the state of of the games industry.
| floydnoel wrote:
| of course that exists, it was posted on this site even! i
| wouldn't be surprised if there are several by now. check out
| Rosebud.ai
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868185
| croes wrote:
| The market for bad games?
|
| It's not the brush that makes the artist.
| evv wrote:
| They have gone with an interesting licensing solution here. I
| really appreciate that it is labeled as a source-available
| license instead of Open Source.
|
| https://defold.com/license/
|
| You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing
| them (unlike GPL). You can freely monetize games built with the
| engine, and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-
| and-switch.
|
| And finally, the reason why this is not Apache 2.0- you cannot
| monetize (forks of) the game engine itself.
|
| This seems fair and carefully considered. Kudos to the team!
| Tepix wrote:
| I agree that the license looks fair. Not everything has to be
| OSI-compliant open source. They even support WASM!
| echelon wrote:
| 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 dies.
|
| The company can choose which services to offer for free and
| which ones to charge a premium for. Cloud CI/builds and hosting
| seem like good monetization levers while leaving the engine and
| editor completely free of charge and open for development and
| modification. You can build a sustainable lifestyle business
| this way.
|
| Database vendors should use licenses like this to prevent
| Amazon from stealing their work and bleeding their cash flow.
|
| Redis and Elasticsearch should have done this before Amazon
| cloned their products, started making bank on managed versions,
| killed their monetization efforts, and turned their communities
| against them.
|
| Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit.
| Shorel wrote:
| People don't have such hindsight. And we can't ask them to
| have it, as it is impossible to predict the future with such
| accuracy.
|
| Without RMS swinging hard one way and without Amazon swinging
| hard the other way, we would not have this license.
|
| It is because all of these shenanigans that we now kind of
| have a license that solves these issues, and surely when the
| landscape changes again, a new license scheme will be needed.
| ilariel wrote:
| 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.
| Game engine products are defined in the license as:
|
| "Game Engine Product" shall mean software used for video game
| development. This includes both the content authoring
| software and the software used to show the created content.
|
| IANAL, but map editors, modding tools and many other kind of
| tools that can be used for developing video games could be in
| violation of the license.
|
| Since meaning of "commercialise" isn't being defined or
| narrowed in the license small creators using Patreon or the
| like while asking donations could be classified as a
| violation too.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It could be nice if they had some sort of easy approval
| process for small Patreon users to commercialize the
| building of tools for their platform.
| PolCPP wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| > Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a
| fit
|
| Not a choice he had. You cannot relicense GPL code line that.
| He would have had to write a new system from scratch instead
| of forking an existing one.
| saghm wrote:
| I thought that copyright holders could relicense code
| however they wanted? I don't think GPL or not is the issue,
| but whether or not all third-party contributors have
| assigned the copyright of their contributions to the party
| trying to relicense. My understanding is that this is often
| difficult or even impossible in practice to obtain after
| the fact codebases with large numbers of contributors over
| the years if signing something ahead of time wasnt't a
| requirement previously, and I don't have any insight into
| whether Wordpress is in this situation or not, but I don't
| think whether the code is GPL or not is relevant to this
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I like the licence, and it is for me open source in spirit if
| not in letter, but there is a case that could cause problems :
| what if you sell services for a closed source version of defold
| ?
| frankvdwaal wrote:
| You'd first have to make proprietary changes, which you are
| not allowed to release, and so there's nobody to sell those
| services to.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| > You are free to distribute original or modified
| (derivative) versions of Defold
|
| You just don't have to release the code if you do change
| it.
|
| Although I'm unsure if selling services on your modified
| game engine, that you released the source of, counts as
| commercialization.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| > You can make proprietary changes to the engine without
| releasing them (unlike GPL).
|
| Why is that a good thing?
|
| >You can freely monetize games built with the engine,
|
| You'd also be able to do the same if it had a GPL license
|
| >and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-
| switch.
|
| If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to
| rely on "some assurances"
| Ethee wrote:
| Consider the space we're in. For game development you're
| going to have a lot of developers with a lot of different
| ideas about how to make a game, all utilizing the same
| engine. If the engine doesn't come with a feature I need,
| I'll probably have to code it myself, but seeing as the whole
| purpose of me making this feature is for my game, then it
| makes sense that I should be able to keep my game's feature
| private/proprietary without the need to push that feature
| back to engine which might not even want my feature to begin
| with. This is why GPL is not a good choice for game engines.
| Arelius wrote:
| More importantly, a successful game is likely to need
| porting to proprietary platforms, with APIs behind
| restrictive NDAs.
|
| Honestly, not great, but that's the world we live in.
| all2 wrote:
| >> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without
| releasing them (unlike GPL). > Why is that a good thing?
|
| Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do
| proprietary things is attractive to big players.
|
| >> and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-
| and-switch.
|
| > If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to
| rely on "some assurances"
|
| Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source.
| Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no
| guarantee).
| executesorder66 wrote:
| > Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to
| do proprietary things is attractive to big players.
|
| Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players and
| not everyone else is a good thing.
|
| >Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open
| source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly
| no guarantee).
|
| Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they
| later become closed source, the code up till that point
| will remain open source forever. So it is guaranteed
| whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.
| all2 wrote:
| > Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players
| and not everyone else is a good thing.
|
| If you want your stuff to be private, you have a legal
| option.
|
| > Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if
| they later become closed source, the code up till that
| point will remain open source forever. So it is
| guaranteed whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.
|
| I guess? Is that not the case here as well?
| progbits wrote:
| Major props to them for not only calling it "source available"
| (and not trying to misuse "open source" like so many do), but
| also for highlighting the additions to their Apache-based
| license: https://defold.com/license/
| progbits wrote:
| IANAL but seems like the only addition is preventing you from
| selling a game engine based on it. So you can sell a game, but
| not an engine. I wonder where a game with built-in editor
| ranks.
|
| Seems fair, but sadly not OSS. I wonder why they think it's
| necessary?
| auggierose wrote:
| Because they don't want somebody else to sell their game
| engine? It's pretty clear, isn't it?
| rowls66 wrote:
| Why would anyone buy their game engine when it is available
| for free? Seems like a solution for a problem that
| doesn't/won't exist.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This was my question to. I suspect they're worried about
| someone making a paid version with extra features which
| aren't contributed back to the community.
|
| For a moment, I was thinking Defold ought to dual-license
| their engine under both the current non-OSS modified
| Apache and the GPL. That way, you'd have the option to
| either:
|
| 1. Commercialise software created using modified versions
| of Defold, without releasing the source of your modified
| version, as long as you don't commercialize your modified
| version of Defold itself.
|
| 2. Commercialise a modified version of Defold, but you
| must make the source available under the GPL. (Which
| would mean that source could be used by the upstream
| project as well.)
|
| But while typing this up, I noticed the flaw in this plan
| --the parenthetical isn't true! _Because_ the upstream
| project would be dual licensed, they couldn 't use GPL
| licensed code.
| Zacru wrote:
| >dual-license the engine under both their current non-OSS
| modified Apache and the GPL.
|
| Of course if they do, I hope they will say " _either_
| modified Apache _or_ the GPL ".
|
| My company's lawyers made a big stink about us using
| jQuery plugins that said "and" instead of "or".
| neallindsay wrote:
| If they didn't prevent selling derivative game engines,
| someone could fork it and add a valuable feature that was
| only available in the paid fork. This could split the
| community.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Yeah, just look at how fractured the Godot community is.
|
| (it's not)
| sarchertech wrote:
| That's because the user base isn't big enough yet for
| Amazon to make a paid version. Or no one at Amazon has
| figured out a way to monetize a game engine yet.
|
| If they do, look out.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Godot's user base is already bigger than Amazon
| Lumberyard's (now O3DE).
|
| Unlike Defold, both Godot and O3DE are actually free.
| sarchertech wrote:
| You can't really look at overall user base, you have to
| look at the number of users making enough money off of
| Godot that they're willing to pay for commercial
| features.
|
| That number is vastly smaller.
|
| If Godot games were making anywhere near the revenue that
| Untity games do, I'm willing to bet they'd there would be
| an Amazon fork.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's you who brought user base size in.
|
| (and it's still bigger for Godot)
| Karliss wrote:
| The modified engine someone else is selling could have a
| potentially important extra features.
|
| For example a company might try to sell a version of
| engine which has been ported to a console which original
| engine doesn't support. Game porting companies are very
| common and if it's their main business then they will
| usually have inhouse libraries or modified engine
| versions which significantly simplify the porting
| process.
|
| That's exactly what's happening with open source game
| engines like Godot. Their documentation lists almost a
| dozen companies providing porting service for godot
| games. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's up to
| author of game engine whether they want to allow others
| to profit from their work in such way.
|
| Seems like currently Defold supported platforms cover
| most of the popular consoles, it was probably not the
| case during early development of engine when license was
| chosen or in a few years when next generation of consoles
| come out. Someone might also be selling a better console
| support than what defold provides out of the box. Beside
| the consoles there is also stuff like integration with
| various PC stores like GOG,Epic and others. Its not
| necessarily a huge work, but plenty of smaller devs want
| to focus only on the gameplay aspects. So once a game is
| finished (and you are tired from development process),
| buying anything which significantly reduces
| porting/integration effort can be an easy choice.
|
| One more example of major feature which can require tight
| engine integration and motivate buying a modified version
| of "free engine" is multiplayer support. Good multiplayer
| support can be quite tricky with some game genres being
| harder than others. There have been many attempts at
| providing magic multiplayer solutions which under the
| hood automatically synchronizes all game entities without
| developer thinking about it. Such approach isn't
| necessarily going to be as good playing experience as
| designing the game with multiplayer support in mind from
| day 0, carefully thinking how the game state is
| organized, what when and how is synchronized. But that
| requires planning ahead, technical expertise and suitable
| budget. Commercial multiplayer middleware for existing
| engines are also not uncommon.
|
| Whether something like that is considered an addon or
| modified engine version depends on exact licensing terms
| and the exact implementation details how game engine and
| addon code is organized.
|
| A slightly different example - game engine built on top
| of game engine is RPG maker. For a long time RPGMaker has
| been it's own game engine. But few years ago developers
| of RPGMaker made a version of RPGMaker which is built on
| top of Unity. Plenty of other genre specific engines
| (especially for fighting games) built on top of general
| purpose game engines. Again the line between modified
| engine, addon and game with builtin editor is tricky.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| RPG in a Box[0] is the first example that sprang to mind
| when I read these comments. It transforms Godot into a
| more generalized "game maker" but could arguably be
| considered selling the engine.
|
| [0]https://rpginabox.com/
|
| Edit: clarity
| dahart wrote:
| Why do you assume the problem won't exist, when this
| exact thing happens all the time? Just to name a tiny
| handful of obvious examples: Oracle, Canonical, GitHub,
| RedHat, DataStax. Not only could someone add enhancements
| that justify the price, like several other comments have
| pointed out here, they could also simply offer support
| that Defold doesn't offer, and they could do marketing
| that Defold doesn't do. The number of paid products that
| are equivalent to and/or based on free products is
| innumerable.
|
| There's no reason to assume that a paid fork would reduce
| the number of free Defold users; it can happen, but
| depends on what is built and offered, and sometimes paid
| forks are good for the ecosystem and increase the number
| of overall users.
| Zambyte wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question of why.
| sbarre wrote:
| I feel like the answer to "why" is on the website if you
| read about the foundation's objectives:
|
| https://defold.com/foundation/
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| >=Support the open source community and the use of open
| licenses.
|
| Tbh I'm a little more confused after reading this
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| They called Defold "open source" at the beginning and
| only changed the wording later when people started
| reacting, so this could be an artifact left from that.
| britzl wrote:
| The main repository (github.com/defold/defold) is the
| only one with the Defold License (ie the modified Apache
| license). There's also around 80 or so MIT licensed
| repositories with Defold engine plugins for things such
| as analytics, monetization, ads, attribution, game
| servers as well as tools such as Spine, Tiled, Rive etc.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > Prevent the Defold software from being commercialised
| by a third-party.
|
| Why?
| dahart wrote:
| Yes it does, it's one of their stated goals: "Prevent the
| Defold software from being commercialised by a third-
| party."
| Zambyte wrote:
| Dare I ask why?
| riidom wrote:
| I don't know what they think, but I think it is not
| necessary. Let's draw a comparison to Blender here. Blender
| is GPL, and there is a long history of questionable projects
| that relabel Blender and try to sell it.
|
| There is the requirement to make the source code available
| (GPL), as far as I am informed, you can sort of get around
| this, by delivering the source code with the download, but
| then "don't advertise" it, as in hide it as much as possible
| without getting in legal trouble.
|
| (My information may be a bit outdated here) Afaik, the
| Blender Foundation doesn't even bother to shut these projects
| down (they do get frequently informed about it, when people
| discover it).
|
| And this even given the fact, that they would be easy to shut
| down. The reason for this, is used media in advertising. If
| you want to sell your 3D package, you need to show some
| impressive artwork which was created with said project.
|
| Problem is, the images/animations these projects show off on
| their websites are a) not created with said Blender reskin,
| but usually in Blender itself and b) they usually don't have
| permission from the artists.
|
| So even having this quite comfortable handle, BF usually
| don't care. Which tells a lot about the impact of such
| copycats.
|
| My takeaway from all this is, the situation would pan out
| pretty similar for Defold, and they should just dare it and
| monitor the landscape.
| palunon wrote:
| Wouldn't the artists be the ones to have standing, instead
| of the Blender Foundation?
| Tepix wrote:
| > Seems fair, but sadly not OSS.
|
| Which of their license changes makes you feel sad and why?
| Were you planning to sell their editor?
| rpdillon wrote:
| The current license makes it unclear whether it would be a
| violation to distribute a commercial game that has a built-
| in map editor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For an unusual license, it is sort of impressive that
| this is the only issue folks can come up with in this
| thread.
|
| It does seem like a bit of problem, but it also seems
| like a very specific thing that could be... cleared up,
| and then it would be all sorted.
| sarchertech wrote:
| It's not an actual problem. Games don't ship with the
| editing tools from the engine because engine editing
| tools aren't suitable for that purpose.
|
| That would be like shipping photoshop with your game to
| allow people to customize their character's hair color.
| Philpax wrote:
| Plenty of games have, with the most famous example being
| Valve's games, which (eventually) ship the same tools
| Valve uses for game creation.
| Tepix wrote:
| You have have to write your own map editor if you want to
| sell it, yes.
| sarchertech wrote:
| You wouldn't ship your game with built in editing tools
| from the engine. Those editing tools are not restrictive
| enough to just hand out to the general player base.
| They're too powerful and too hard to use.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Maybe they would (different games foster different
| cultures). Maybe they'd use it as a starting point and
| derive something more friendly.
| echelon wrote:
| There are a lot of reasons to go "source available", such as
| preventing hyperscalers or enterprises from lifting your
| product.
|
| Here's some commentary I made in another thread on this post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728095
| Zambyte wrote:
| What product? They aren't selling anything. Like at all.
| echelon wrote:
| This looks similar to the classic "enterprise support"
| and "distribution" lifestyle business play, which is
| incredibly sustainable and benefits both the software
| community as well as the maintainers. From their website:
|
| Support [1] page:
|
| > Please contact us at business@defold.se for more
| information on how we can help you publish great games
| made with Defold.
|
| About [2] page:
|
| > Product development, marketing, support and sales -
| Refold AB is owned by members of the Defold team and is
| contracted to perform most of the day to day work on the
| Defold product.
|
| Open [3] page:
|
| > Q: Is there still going to be a roadmap for Defold?
|
| > A: The Defold Foundation has decided to no longer share
| a public roadmap at the beginning of each year.
|
| Status [4] page:
|
| > Defold will never change into a subscription model,
| request royalty payments, introduce licensing fees or in
| other ways charge for access to the _main_ (emphasis
| added) product.
|
| FAQ [5] page:
|
| > Q: What kind of user tracking are you doing?
|
| > A: We log anonymous usage data from our websites and
| the Defold editor in order to improve our services and
| product.
|
| They're using a lot of SaaS typical for startup/business
| growth. Their forums are Discourse [6], they're running a
| bunch of analytics, SendInBlue for campaigns, etc. That
| in and of itself doesn't imply anything, but they do seem
| to be very mindful of their community's health and
| growth.
|
| There are some very dedicated people at the wheel. It
| looks like they've carved out enough leeway for
| commercial and support offerings to sustain themselves
| and keep others from stealing it like Amazon and others
| have done to other open source projects in the past, all
| the while building a cool community-powered open game
| engine.
|
| [1] https://defold.com/support/
|
| [2] https://defold.com/about/
|
| [3] https://defold.com/open/
|
| [4] https://defold.com/status/
|
| [5] https://defold.com/faq/faq/
|
| [6] https://forum.defold.com/ ; Discourse is $100/mo or
| more for custom domains
| chucklenorris wrote:
| I remember this was initially developed at king games
| (candycrush saga authors) before they got acquired. Probably
| that's the reason for the weird licensing model
| britzl wrote:
| Yes, you are correct. An MIT license was preferred by the
| Defold team but the modified Apache license was what was
| decided upon in the end.
| japhib wrote:
| > I wonder where a game with built-in editor ranks
|
| The website-summarized version of the license says:
|
| > You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative)
| versions of the Defold editor and/or engine
|
| It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're
| literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with
| any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map
| or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for
| other people to then sell a modified version of their entire
| game.
|
| It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available,
| and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of
| Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode
| project to players just so the players can make a custom map.
|
| The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-
| new map-editing UI _inside_ Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot,
| etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format
| that the game can parse.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > (and not trying to misuse "open source" like so many do)
|
| They only stopped because of the backlash they received when
| they tried to. Their initial announcement was about "Defold
| becoming open source".
| britzl wrote:
| The Defold Foundation immediately stopped calling Defold
| open-source when it was pointed out that the license was in
| conflict with the OSI definition.
|
| https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-
| sour...
| nunodonato wrote:
| I'd love to see a more in-depth comparison in terms of features
| with Godot. Seems the latter is much more advanced, at least in
| 3d capabitilies.
| vunderba wrote:
| Defold isn't really intended for 3D games at all. It's got a
| much stronger focus on 2D mobile/web.
| britzl wrote:
| Not entirely true, but sure, there are fewer bells and
| whistles in Defold compares to Unity, Unreal and Godot when
| it comes to 3D.
|
| Here's a recently released 3D game made with Defold:
| https://forum.defold.com/t/cashchubbies-island/78183/22
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Related ongoing submission here[1], about a game with 60k LOC of
| Lua using this engine.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723088
| Ralfp wrote:
| I've used to follow this few years ago. This is a game engine
| created by King that they then set free after deinvesting from it
| themselves.
| LichenStone wrote:
| How does this compare to something like Godot?
| popcar2 wrote:
| It's less featured and has limited 3D support, but Defold is
| great for making smaller games aimed at the web or mobile. It
| has a much smaller binary size and it's generally more stable,
| especially in terms of physics. If you take a look at the
| showcase it's mostly webgames and a few smaller indies.
| martinbaun wrote:
| Thank you, I started Godot recently and I'll take a look at
| Defold as this is the exact thing I am doing - and Godot
| seems a little unstable with the APIs. Every tutorial I find
| is for Godot 3, and Godot 4 seems quite changed.
| barotalomey wrote:
| google "godot 4 tutorial", not "godot tutorial"
| nkrisc wrote:
| The version 3 to 4 transition was used to make breaking
| improvements to many things. The API is intended to remain
| stable within major versions. The docs also cover the major
| API changes from 3 to 4 and comprehensive docs exists for
| both version and you can still use Godot 3 if you want to.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Am I correctly understanding that this is a for-profit endeavor
| that's relying solely on donations?
| jsheard wrote:
| Looks like they offer paid support, and the console branches
| obviously aren't public so you'd have to make a deal to access
| those.
| britzl wrote:
| No. Wrong. Console branches are available for free if you are
| approved by the vendor.
| ksymph wrote:
| It's also being funded by a number of corporate sponsors. As I
| understand it, a studio or publisher will fund the development
| of a specific feature, while general development is mostly just
| spare time and donations.
| britzl wrote:
| No, Defold is developed by six full time and two part time
| developers. All developers are fairly compensated. Most of
| the work done on the engine is "general development" funded
| by corporate partners, studios and publishers. There is quite
| a bit of overlap between the needs of specific partners and
| the general development roadmap.
| tunaoftheland wrote:
| 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 platform build/release
| tooling does cost money for game devs because the platform SDKs
| themselves impose restrictions. But I get the impression that
| defold as org does seem to put in earnest effort to be fair to
| game devs with licensing, etc. like others mentioned here.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 2013, then
| opened to its current licensing model in 2016.
| mtnygard wrote:
| AFAIK, King spun Defold back out as a foundation.
| britzl wrote:
| Yes, this happened early in 2020. Defold has been a public
| product longer with the Defold Foundation than with King.
| King has not been affiliated with Defold for a very long
| time.
| croes wrote:
| Given the addictive nature of Candy Crush it's a little bit
| like a drug lord building a hospital.
|
| Candy Crush is less deadly than drugs, but a game engine is
| less useful than a hospital
| mtnygard wrote:
| 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!
| bentt wrote:
| 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 ONLY beef, from what I saw, was that it was Lua only. If it
| was C# I would have been more excited. But at least it's not a
| full C++ recompile like SOME engines. :)
| tapoxi wrote:
| 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.
| bentt wrote:
| Yeah I really like Godot and you're right, the third parties
| are working hard on that front. It's been a trial for them
| though.
|
| I guess the roots with King have made things easier for
| Defold?
| saejox wrote:
| 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.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Most indie games sell on Steam/Steam Deck first and port to
| consoles later, usually after being picked up by an indie
| publisher.
|
| The $2000 is also to port to all three console platforms,
| it's $800 per. This makes it feasible to say, only target
| PlayStation with W4 and use the community Switch port.
| japhib wrote:
| 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!
| neonsunset wrote:
| That third party is owned by Godot's leadership and
| management. Your Godot contributions go towards their
| pockets.
| maheart wrote:
| Here's a list of other 3rd party porters: https://docs.godo
| tengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co... Stop
| spreading FUD. It's FOSS. It's like saying contributing to
| systemd lines the pockets of Red Hat.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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, <X>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).
| japhib wrote:
| If you just want static typing, you can write Typescript and
| compile to Lua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/
| anentropic wrote:
| The Defold site recommends:
|
| > Optional typed Lua using Teal.
|
| https://defold.com/product/
|
| https://defold.com/assets/teal/
|
| https://github.com/teal-language/tl
| britzl wrote:
| Also https://ts-defold.dev/
| japhib wrote:
| They recently added C# support:
| https://forum.defold.com/t/defold-c-support/79479
| britzl wrote:
| C# support is still experimental and under development, but
| it is at least ready for testing for those that are curious.
| Note that it is C# with Native AOT so it's compilation and
| linking involved, not "scripting and hotreload".
| imzadi wrote:
| I was curious about VR development, and after reading this, I'm
| still not sure: https://forum.defold.com/t/official-refold-
| stance-on-vision-...
| 383toast wrote:
| Does anyone know if Defold can be used without the UI? Eg. just
| running it as a library or using scripting to do everything the
| game engine UI can do.
|
| Purpose is just to try to get an AI to generate code with it.
| ksymph wrote:
| In theory yes, data is just stored in json and there's a CLI
| utility [1] for building. It's pretty awkward though.
|
| [1] https://defold.com/manuals/bob/
| britzl wrote:
| No, data is stored in protobuf text format (and at runtime
| compiled to binary protobuf files ofc).
| synergy20 wrote:
| is Teal widely used? https://github.com/teal-language/tl
|
| Teal to lua is what typescript to javascript
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| No. But I've used it for Pico-8 development. I had to write a
| tool that turned it into mygame.tl into a mygame.p8 cart on
| save though.
| japhib wrote:
| 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/
| debugnik wrote:
| No, but Luau (which is more of a fork) from the Roblox studio
| is seeing growing adoption. Notably, it was used for Alan Wake
| 2.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Looking into the code ... Wow ... This is not C++, it is C with
| classes ...
| https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/dev/engine/dlib/src/dm...
| Any reasons to use these wrappers instead of modern C++
| capabilities?
| ksymph wrote:
| There's a great post on that by the lead Defold dev:
| https://defold.com/2020/05/31/The-Defold-engine-code-style/
| robterrell wrote:
| In the game industry, "C-like C++" is the norm. Games often
| don't use modern C++ features like exceptions, RTTI, multiple
| inheritance, etc. for very good reasons.
| rockyj wrote:
| Defold has been there for a while, not sure of why this in on the
| front page right now. Anyways, Defold is good, the community,
| docs etc. are on the lower side as compared to Godot.
|
| The other options include MonoGame https://monogame.net/ (Stardew
| Valley was written in it) and of-course the biggies like Unity or
| Unreal. A lot depends on how much investment in learning one
| wants to make, what is the feature set one is looking for, the
| trade-offs or platforms one wants to keep in mind and which
| programming language / style one want to use.
| croes wrote:
| Because this story about Lua made the front page and they use
| Defold
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723088
| vednig wrote:
| A game engine that's opensource and supports Linux. Love it
| Narishma wrote:
| It's not open source, it's source available.
| zerr wrote:
| Related: code-oriented C++ 2D game engine - Axmol Engine. It's an
| actively maintained Cocos2D-x fork: https://axmol.dev
| aaroninsf wrote:
| 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 <the engine/platform>
|
| Do Claude Code etc. know Unity dev? Engines like this one? I
| don't know! Naive.
|
| Haaaaalp
| spacechild1 wrote:
| I'm building 2D computer game environments for musical
| performances and interactive installations. I ended up
| developing my own little engine. The current iteration is based
| on:
|
| - SDL2 for input and window management
|
| - OpenGL for rendering
|
| - libpd for sound generation and processing
|
| - RtAudio for audio I/O
|
| - sol2 for Lua bindings
|
| - Qt6 for the tile map editor
|
| I'm not targeting the web, though.
|
| > The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to
| graphical elements
|
| Are the sounds generated from game events? In that case, time
| synchronization between game clock and audio clock is indeed an
| interesting problem with multiple solutions, each with their
| own trade-offs.
|
| If the game only acts as the user interface, you can treat it
| like in a regular DAW.
| Nijikokun wrote:
| Defold is good, been around a very long time, but it's just rough
| around the edges, once you get used to it it's pretty smooth
| sailing though.
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| How does it compare to Love 2D, other than shipping with a IDE?
| Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are
| some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles
| usually come with very non-open dependencies.
|
| https://love2d.org/
| shmerl wrote:
| How does it compare to Godot?
| tombert wrote:
| Noticed it wasn't on Nixpkgs, so...
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/399843
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