Hey,
I’m curious to know what the Defold team’s plans are for 3D support. Defold itself is marketed as a 2D engine, however 3D-centric features have been added and focused on with a few of the most recent updates. Do you see Defold becoming a more viable option for 3D games in the future, or do you plan to stick primarily with 2D and only support very basic 3D functionality out of the box?
Hopefully 3D features continue to evolve. Even 2D games are technically “3D” in the sense that sprites are layered in a certain order. And the market is moving more towards 3D renderers in general. A lot of games on the Android market are 2D in the gameplay sense but employ 3D renderers. My game is also similar this way (although I do have one enemy so far that actually moves in the Z dimension 
)
I’m not against an evolution of 3D features per se, but I would be surprised if the engine pivoted more towards 3D than 2D (I am of course aware that the engine is actually 3D even if I use it for 2D things only). I believe (and I think this was echoed by a Defold person, but I might be misremembering) that there isn’t much point in going full out on 3D functionality because the engine then begins to compete more directly with other engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot, which would likely be a losing battle and I wouldn’t see the point personally.
That said, there’s of course a middle ground and some additional 3D functionality will probably be a good thing - even if I personally don’t end up using a lot of it.
The 3D features of Defold will continue to evolve, but at a slow pace. We do not wish to go head to head with Unity, Unreal (or Godot) on 3D features as that wouldn’t be a very fair fight. We will continue to focus our efforts on the areas where we stand out from our competitors and make sure that Defold will always be a great choice for performant cross platform 2D games with a splash of 3D here and there.
The only thing stopping me from making big 3D projects in Defold is being able to use meshes for collisions.
Anyone could make a replacement mesh collision / physics extension too, it doesn’t have to be the builtin one. But just making it work with Bullet would probably be the best option for those who are motivated to go for doing that.
Now that the source is available, getting things like tangent in shaders would be reasonably easily possible for any funded team serious about making a 3D project with Defold.
At least trying to make what’s possible in older generation console games would be worth going for.