Defold: Lua game engine for web and mobile
defold.com
defold.com
Defold engine code overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25569224 - Dec 2020 (45 comments)
The Defold engine code style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23371705 - May 2020 (6 comments)
Defold game engine source now available and free to use for commercial games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232648 - May 2020 (293 comments)
Defold: 2D Game Engine by King.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11352546 - March 2016 (87 comments)
Here's why King gave away its 2D mobile game engine Defold - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321802 - March 2016 (12 comments)
Defold: Free 2D Game Engine for Cross-Platform Publishing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10607837 - Nov 2015 (2 comments)
Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284 - Nov 2012 (44 comments)
And later
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/13/unity-seeks-to...
Covered on this site, but downtime makes linking to the threads hard - I'm 50/50 on whether this comment will be accepted!
That said, we are seeing that it might be worth starting out on an open source platform and dig in to make it state-of-the-art.
Not everyone is interested or capable of doing that, though.
Of course, open source projects regrettably become closed source projects sometimes too (see Hashicorps recent moves), locking you into the previous version of the project.... but, with Open Source, you can fork the project and continue- or ally with other members of the community to fork- often at a lower cost than re-training and re-tooling. An option that does not exist in the proprietary world.
You'd be hard pressed to compete with Epic Games' investment in the engine for their own games and others, too. I don't think this situation is comparable with Hashicorp. Epic has more than a hundred engineers continuously improving the engine, doing research on new technologies like Nanite and similar, and all their improvements are available to you immediately. You have full source code available and are able to modify it as needed, you can also fork it under the current terms. As far as I know there were never any forks with significant traction, only to implement random features people needed in their game.
This is just a guess, but I truly don't believe we are going to see Epic Games turn evil like Unity has as long as Tim Sweeney holds more than 50% of the shares. Going public was Unity's death sentence - the tech no longer mattered, now it was all about extracting the maximum value possible before the company is run into the ground.
That is obviously wishful thinking and probably not a good bet for a game dev company dependent on cutting edge Unreal features to make. However, not all game developers are in need of cutting edge, for many, Godot 4 will offer them what they need already. O3DE looks interesting, but seems only really currently usable by a company which plans to do a lot of custom engine work themselves already.
I am currently trying to learn Godot 4 in my spare time (which unfortunately I don't have enough of), and if I ever start to make money off it, I will be donating a percentage back to Godot development. I certainly don't begrudge a developer going with Unreal, but I encourage them to look at alternatives and what they really need to plan for the future and not be tied into the present situation.
Unless your team's business model is to _be a Unity team_, it is a matter of determine your goals, evaluate options, get buy-in then start making changes every day to generate that outcome. Don't sell it as a "I hate Unity." Sell it as "it is time to consider how we maintain our future by diversify our skills."
I think many hobby game developers don't realize the astounding important of designer oriented tools. Even most game companies have coders create designer oriented gui tools for games to be more productive.
Whatever open source engine cracks an easy 3d player controller, dialogue system, human retargeted animation system, and easy editor extensions will KILL the competition asap.
Game editors have pretty much all arrived at the Unity scene model and editor workflow (game object outliner to the left, scene view in the middle, property panel on the right, asset browser at the bottom, plus floating panels for things like animations, material definitions, game specific data, or anything else really - everything needs to be extensible through scripting).
The Unity Editor and asset pipeline is hackable enough to use it as editor for another engine, I did that in the past as "proof of concept" and it definitely works, but is most likely a legal minefield.
Blender is also definitely hackable enough to serve that role (see: https://armory3d.org/) (again I did something similar in the past with Maya, it kinda works, but this wasn't very popular with artists because they were overwhelmed by the unfamiliar and complex Maya UI).
PS: the Defold examples page is actually really cool, with realtime examples running in the browser:
I really wonder how dangerous it is legally. I'm already been (slowly) writing a rust tool to convert some Unity .meta for bevy engine before the Unity pricing crisis.
Unity has no this built-in.
> dialogue system,
Neither.
> human retargeted animation system
Unity has a built-on one but it's shitty.
If a new game engine emerged with these, they could take most of unity's market share without needing an asset store of their own.
- https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine - https://wickedengine.net/
The first video on Steam seems to show a dialog system.
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967460/Wicked_Engine/
(How are you supposed to create lists in hacker news comments?)
It's actually worse than that, though, because it goes out of its way to obscure the license terms; in this instance, they're going for association with the cachet and warm fuzzies of the Apache license by throwing that name around, despite not actually being Apache licensed. This is not the result of oversight or ignorance. It's intentionally deceptive.
For anyone who thinks that I'm reading between the lines and overstating this, you can refer to the last time this came up. They received sufficient pushback about their messaging. They're not just aware of the discrepancy between the consensus definition and the way they're using it, they acknowledged it explicitly. In response, they said, "We are humbled [...] also sorry for misrepresenting the license" and that "We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term"[1]. In 2023, there's a big fat nav item at the top of the site that says "Open Source". You click it and read the fine print which gradually reveals the truth of the matter. The "open source" part refers (apparently?) to... their extension ecosystem?
Everything about this screams, "We know exactly what we're doing, but we're going about it in such a way that we can claim plausible deniability."
The main item on the landing page says "free to use" and "source available", while that "big fat nav item", that doesn't show up on mobile without clicking on the navigation, clearly states:
> Defold is a source available game engine with a developer-friendly license derived from the popular Apache 2.0 License.
And under "Open source":
> A large selection of official and community developed open source extensions are available through the Asset Portal.
I think this is clear enough, and doesn't seem like they're abusing the open source terminology. Whether you agree or not with their license is another topic, but their copy seems clear to me (an OSS enthusiast and first-time visitor on their site).
That said, the title of this HN post is misleading, and definitely needs to be updated to reflect this.
(Feel free to address literally any of the pre-emptive points I made in my post, rather than responding as if I didn't already make them.)
... was, in fact, not addressed.
To the extent that my comment contains speculative claims, the charges are aligned with the developers' undisputed past behavior.
And given that it's blatantly obvious what's going on, even without their previous admission, no one has any obligation to pussyfoot around on things like giving the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt here—no reasonable doubt, at least. Only willful mendacity.
They are not being willfully mendacious. You are being willfully dickish.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Oh, and please don't say "the standard definition", because that is definitely contested, even after all these years.
That's easy: Defold (the project linked here).
> Also, if that source is available, you could point out which definition of open source you are going by.
That's easy, too: I'm using the same definition that the Defold developers are using.
"Open Source" was wrongly added to the title by the poster. It's not used on the site to describe the engine.
Leading to page that says that Defond is not actually open source.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235217>
What am I misreading?
They didn't say they were going to "no longer use the term (with respect to the Defold engine)". They said weren't using it. Why? Precisely so "as to not confuse it with the OSD". Let's recap:
They used to use the term "open source" (one part of an overall effort to misrepresent themselves and their work). Then they said they took it out—which means that if the term is there now—and it is there now—then they either didn't actually take it out, or they took it out and then put it back in, even after saying they were "sorry for misrepresenting the license under which we make the source code available".
Prevaricating on the whether or not a known bad actor is technically wrong in sidling up next to a line they've already once crossed isn't a defense of the subject of here—because the subject is not strictly confined to whether or not they are crossing it now. It is the very fact that they've indisputably crossed line before, admitted to it and issued a presumed sincere apology when called out, and yet here they are—reaping the rewards of the misleading[1] way in which their messaging is being perceived (again).
My "gloss" of something they themselves acknowledged—how are you not getting this?
It's like if someone gets charged with something, briefly attempts to maintain some dubious and not-terribly-convincing story that they didn't do the thing, but then does eventually cop to doing the thing, gets a light sentence for having acknowledged that they did the thing (maybe even cheered on for their humility in doing so), and then three years later upon having some new sketch called out, defenders leap up saying, "oh, well that's just your take; prove they'd ever done that". They already acknowledged it themselves; that's not a "move" that's available to you anymore, bud. These are total motte-and-bailey shenanigans.
> and a response to the wrong title. . They didn't write the title
I flag comments that complain about titles. Between the two of us, you are the only one to have mentioned the title of the submission—which isn't even the title anymore. (Repeatedly. Why?)
You can continue to try to get me to direct my attention to the title, and I will continue to ignore it and limit my comments to what's actually at issue. Go ahead and keep strawmanning the shit out of me, though. Maybe it'll stick.
Let's make it stick by wrapping up here.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grice's_maxims>
This is the issue: you are in the untenable position where...
- those you are defending had a charge leveled against them
- they have acknowledged that they were doing it—there is no cloak of plausible deniability here, and yet
- you are defending them on grounds of plausible deniability, anyway
So square the circle—and stop mentioning the submission title. (I'm not interested in the title. Nobody is.)
I have received your letter of this date containing the terms of the surrender of the Army of Northern Tangentia, as proposed by you. As they are substantially the same as those expressed in your letter of the 8th inst., they are accepted. I will proceed to designate the proper officers to carry the stipulations into effect.
You're not allowed to fork and then profit from the engine itself, or the editor. That's a really important distinction, and you're right that it should be highlighted.
But it seems very reasonable to me. Any real game dev won't care about that. Basically, you can't resell the engine, but you can do anything you want with the games created by it.
They make the license terms very clear. Their license page highlights the differences to the text of the Apache 2.0 license. The only change is that you can't sell the engine itself. https://defold.com/license/
"intentionally deceptive" "there's a big fat nav item at the top of the site"
The Defold guys have released multiple components on Github with the MIT license. The fact that a navigation item is named "Open Source" does not say that all or most of the software from this company is Open Source. For example, the fact that the Apple developer site has a navigation item named "Open Source" similarly doesn't mean that all or most of Apple's software is Open Source.
"Everything about this screams"
You're attributing unverifiable negative intentions to the Defold developers.
This, the last HN thread about this, and other similar negative feedback create an incentive to avoid the term "Open Source" in order to steer clear of potential negative publicity for innocent misunderstandings and different opinions.
But they also have an incentive to keep the words "open source" in a sufficiently prominent position on their website to ensure that search engines list their page in the results for the search term "open source game engine", since it's a relevant result for almost all people who search for that term.
I'm attributing motives to them based on their own admission—that they were misrepresenting their project. There's nothing unverifiable about it. They posted on HN and tweeted about it—their own words. It's not reaching on my part. (Why are you, like other commenters here, so attached to the plausible deniability angle? It's not available anymore. It's gone.)
> they also have an incentive to keep the words "open source" in a sufficiently prominent position on their website to ensure that search engines list their page in the results for the search term "open source game engine"
Uh...? Giving an accounting of the incentives isn't exculpatory.
Thieves have an incentive to take things that aren't theirs. Liars have an incentive to tell people things that aren't true. Cheaters have an incentive to have sex with someone who isn't their partner. We already know _why_ they want to do it. That wasn't ever in dispute.
> This, the last HN thread about this, and other similar negative feedback create an incentive to avoid the term "Open Source"
This is as baffling of a remark as the earlier one.
By "avoid the term" you mean "avoid misrepresenting the license under which they're really making the source code available".
Prosecuting murder is a form of negative feedback that discourages people from carrying out murder. This is known. It's not an unfortunate consequence. It's rather the whole point.