britzl

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.

No, data is stored in protobuf text format (and at runtime compiled to binary protobuf files ofc).

No. Wrong. Console branches are available for free if you are approved by the vendor.

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

Also https://ts-defold.dev/

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".

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.

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.

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...

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.

I'm sorry, but your entire post sure sounded like you are upset with Defold claiming the product to be FOSS when in fact we do nothing of the sort.

If I misinterpreted your meaning then I apologise.

The Defold Foundation does not call Defold FOSS. PERIOD. Stop saying that we do.

Next: The Defold Foundation is a foundation, not a corporation, and it is registered in Stockholm, Sweden. It has a different legal status than a corporation and while it is allowed to make a profit there are no stock holders or owners that can profit from the earnings.

Also, as a foundation, it has a clear set of goals that cannot be altered:

1. Make the Defold software available to the public.

2. Make the Defold source code available free of charge to a third-party.

3. Manage the Defold software through updates, modifications, development and support.

4. Prevent the Defold software from being commercialised by a third-party.

5. Support the open source community and the use of open licenses.

The reason we had to modify the Apache 2.0 license to add non-commercialization of the engine+editor was to fulfil goal #4.

You might now think that it's pretty stupid to use a modified license since goal #5 says "support the use of open licenses". I agree. I would have preferred an unmodified OS license for the main repo. BUT the Defold Foundation also maintain ~60 other open source repositories, most of them with an MIT License. 32 of these are Defold game engine extensions to interface with things such as In-App Purchases, Analytics, Ads, Camera etc.

Finally I want to say that we are not interested in "independent devs feeling suckered into doing free support". We obviously accept and appreciate contributions, but it is not our goal to make Defold into an engine which relies purely on community contributions to thrive. Defold depends on corporate sponsorships for long-term sustainability, not community contributions. And if we see prominent contributions coming from individuals we are very open to properly compensating said individuals from the funds of the foundation.

Defold is definitely not for everyone and not for all kinds of games. Defold is better at 2D than 3D for instance. But it is a 3D engine so it will sort everything on z-value.

> It felt like someone was caught up in an architecture more suited to creating very large games and applied it here.

Defold is supposed to be the exact opposite. The two initial creators of Defold worked at a big AAA developer and with Defold they wanted something different from their day-to-day experience working on huge console games. They wanted a small and performant engine with quick turnaround time on changes.

This is why it is somewhat opinionated regarding certain things. To avoid some of the costly things that usually comes with huge productions and big complex engines.

It is also why you can usually build and bundle your game in seconds to any platform without any setup.

It is the reason why you can hot reload your changes into a running game to further reduce iteration time.

This is a very good point! Looking at our top menu items again I can see how it looks for a new visitor.

* Product (https://defold.com/product/) lists engine features. This should probably be renamed Features.

* Showcase (https://defold.com/showcase/) shows games made with Defold. It is not so much a showcase for specific engine features but rather a showcase of different kinds of games that has been made with Defold. Perhaps we should rename it to Games.

As a side-note regarding games: We will start posting developer case-studies in a few weeks. These case-studies will show both the games and the features of the engine as well as clever solutions to problems and how Defold has helped the creators while developing their games.

Here's a forum thread created by a relatively new Defold user documenting part of the process from prototype to finished game: https://forum.defold.com/t/apple-spider-casual-arcade-action...

Another from a more experienced team, but new to Defold:

https://forum.defold.com/t/travel-blast-by-mpgames/66089?u=b...

"Low entry level compared to Unity. Lua is easy to learn programming language. One of our UI designers became Defold developer in a month"

Sure, I get what you are saying, and yes, perhaps we should also include screenshots. I'll see what we can do.

But keep in mind that the showcase page isn't there to sell the games. It is there to show that professional games have been released using Defold. And to show to that you can be productive and release games when you use Defold. Screenshots or illustrations does not matter in this case. Neither says anything about the quality of the engine. And we opted for illustrations as that works better on a showcase page.

You can get in touch with Defold users here: https://forum.defold.com/

Completely true. Defold is not FOSS. And we do not claim that it is.

We initially said that Defold was open source when we actually should have said source available. And we got an unbelievable amount of flak for it! I even received a very disturbing message sent to my private email from a FOSS "champion". And the president of the OSI got in touch as well.

More here: https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...

We are actively investigating additional console support (we only support Nintendo Switch) in 2021. Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/defold) to not miss any annoucements!

Perhaps ask Mike from GamesFromScratch to do a comparison video?

One thing that will differ between the engines is the number of support platforms.

But apart from that I believe there are many similarities. Most engines today have long lists of features and they are all quite powerful. But something that usually isn't immediately obvious from a feature list is how it is to work with the engine and tools day in and day out while developing games. What are the pain-points and what are the time-savers of each engine?

We list a few things Defold does really well here:

https://defold.com/why/

The Defold license: https://defold.com/license/

The only thing you can't do is sell Defold itself (ie the engine and editor). You can commercialise your games in any way you want and you can modify the engine and editor without having to share your modifications.

Yes, Defold supports Metal through MoltenVK and the Vulkan graphics backend.

Great feedback! Thanks. You should be able to click on any of the games to get to a store page or similar where you can see screenshots of each game.

King still has one internal engine used in most of their franchise titles (Candy Crush, Farm etc). Defold was used internally for several years, but the major adoption was seen outside of King, so it made a lot of sense to make Defold completely independent of King earlier this year.

Hi! Defold Foundation member here.

1. The first lines of Defold code were written more than 10 years ago and at that time Cap'n'Proto and Flatbuffers didn't exist. One could argue that we should change to a newer format, but for our purposes protobuf still works really well.

2. Defold uses LuaSockets to make TCP and UDP sockets available to developers through our Lua API. And we also make TCP sockets available to our C extension system.

3. The next big task which we will start the new year with is a full review of our texture compression formats. Basis Universal is on our list of formats to investigate.

4. While we do support import of basic 3D models our focus has been mainly on 2D content. We are currently negotiating funding for improved 3D support in a work package for 2021. If all goes well you can expect some major improvements in this area.

Feel free to ask more questions!

It has been corrected now. https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...

Not sure how you are counting. Romain and Sara work for King. Elin is a consultant. Björn (me) and Mathias have left King to work on behalf of the foundation.

This makes me realise that I need to update my LinkedIn profile if anyone bothers to check it!

The release of the Defold source code and the transition to the Defold Foundation was the culmination of many months of preparations. While most things went smoothly (except an SVG which crashed the Firefox browser!) we never anticipated the amount of feedback we received on our use of the term Open Source. We have summarised our thoughts and the actions we have taken here:

https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...

Yeah, sorry, product owner here!