This is quite good news, to say the least. This is one of the most well-integrated, sensible engines and development environments I've ever used.<p>Can't wait to patch more native moonscript support into a fork :evil:<p>If you want to see an overview of a somewhat typical and polished mobile game done with Defold, here's a non-King dev showing off his work: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4pJ8A3YS4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4pJ8A3YS4</a><p>Also, in relevant news, Corona (the other major Lua game engine[1]) is also being open-sourced, and renamed to Solar2D: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326462" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326462</a><p>[1] with dev ecosystem of extensions, build services etc - without that Love2D might also qualify
We are humbled by the mostly positive reactions to the news we shared earlier today but also sorry for misrepresenting the license under which we make the source code available. Defold is a free and open game engine with a permissive license. The source code is available on GitHub and we invite the community to contribute.<p>We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term "Open Source" as to not confuse it with the OSD.<p>The Defold license, complete with a summary of what you can and cannot do, can be seen on our license page: <a href="https://defold.com/license/" rel="nofollow">https://defold.com/license/</a><p>We have also Tweeted this: <a href="https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517</a>
King's unsavory handling of trademark disputes (trademarking "Candy" and "Saga" and voraciously enforcing it against games like The Banner Saga and CandySwipe [which came out before Candy Crush]) is gonna steer me clear of this one.
Wow, this will hopefully ignite a sleuth of creativity. I think their choice of using lua to script while also having a pretty great user experience (in v2 and v1) should put them on the radar for most indie developers now. Hopefully this also creates some friendly competition with godot (though I think they have the momentum) but for 2d prototyping for programming novices, I'll always recommend defold. Kudos King.
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:<p><a href="https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-source-discussion/" rel="nofollow">https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...</a>
For anyone who's used this, how does it compare with popular open source engines like Godot, and with the commercial industry standards like Unreal Engine and Unity?
Why would you use this over say, Unity or Unreal? Seems more niche, less popular (so less assets/community libraries etc.) and less integrated into...everything?
You can accomplish quite a bit with this game engine, check out this narrative that I started making with Defold a few months ago (playable in browser)<p><a href="https://lilrooness.itch.io/control" rel="nofollow">https://lilrooness.itch.io/control</a>
I like the second line-comment in the startup file (com.defold.editor.Start.java); makes it seem familiar with all my projects.<p><pre><code> // A terrible hack as an attempt to avoid a deadlock when loading native libraries.</code></pre>
It is a polished product, and it is a good move. I did try to use it briefly in a small sample, it was reasonably easy to use as well. However I didn't like Lua, would have preferred something more flexible/expressive like JS.<p>Lua has something of the schoolhouse feel about it, too prim and rigid like Pascal.<p>So I am presently thinking of moving on to Phaser.io.
Sadly, this article has no Defold listed, but why?<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0de74" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...</a>
This is not open source. There is a well established definition of open source [0].<p>It includes "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"<p>"You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine" does not meet (6).<p>I'm not even going to start on the use of the term "free".<p>[0] <a href="https://opensource.org/osd" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/osd</a>
geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil.<p>A company gave away their app making tool for free, and these people are sitting in front of their keyboard talking shit about how "this is subverting the definition of 'open source'", seriously?<p>Also what's so evil about the clause:<p>> "You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine" does not meet (6).<p>What's so wrong about businesses trying to give back to the community while protecting themselves against the likes of Microsoft and Amazon who will naturally take the code and monetize if there's no clause that restricts anti competition?<p>Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source. There are many reasons people open source their projects, for transparency, for giving assurance to the ecosystem, etc. By trying to box the definition down to a single very narrow minded idea, you're actually hurting the growth of open source instead of helping.
It's truly unfortunate how some companies try to sell their shared source products as "open source". I guess HN should change the title.<p>UPD: Okay title has been changed and it's all good now.
If you're interested in game engines using Lua, please also consider Planimeter's Grid Engine (<a href="https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/</a> and <a href="https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk</a>) which has been in steady development for about a decade, having even more features than Defold and Solar2D, such as out-of-the-box multiplayer with client-server prediction, Tiled support, configuration bindings, and much more that you'd have to roll yourself in both engines! (and it's MIT licensed to boot.)<p>No other game engine in Lua is going to provide dedicated server support out of the box besides Grid.<p>It's all also built on the latest version of LÖVE, which gives you access to all of the software in that ecosystem, too. It's the only full fledged game engine on LÖVE that we know of.<p>It's less known as we don't do much advertising and have had far fewer contributors, but our focus has been consistent over the years.<p>Because we have fewer resources, we also work very closely with those using the software if you have any questions.<p>While a collection of game engines using Lua seem to be tapering off in active development, such as Polycode, Corona, and perhaps now Defold, Planimeter's Grid engine is actively used by the group for game development projects, and will continue to be supported into the future, bringing commercial support in 2021.