Defold Editor Roadmap?

Roadmap
#1

Hey,

I’m currently scouting out 2D game engines to find the one most fitting for our team to use, testing them out as much as possible and getting feedback from the people working with me. At the moment, we’re heavily leaning towards Defold, however there are a few hitches which make the decision less clear-cut.

I imagine this is the case for a lot of people when they come scouting for an engine to use. There are posts around the forums indicating that certain things “may be done” or “are on the backlog”, which I personally find great to see that you guys are taking community suggestions on-board, however some of these things haven’t been mentioned in months with no indication if they’re in the pipeline or not.

Obviously, you can’t add everything for everyone, and time is a serious factor, but I feel it would be in everyone’s advantage if there was some form of timeline or road-map available so people have a rough idea of when certain things can be expected. Would this be something that’s feasible?

#2

You should list out the features which are deal breakers for your team.

AFAIK there are plans for a public roadmap but it’s one of those things where there are lists of things to do and it has to wait to be a priority. Time goes too fast when you’re busy working hard!

1 Like
#3

I originally left the list of features we desired out of my post intentionally, I didn’t want it to seem like I was seeking community attention for the sole purpose of our project, rather something that could benefit both our team and everyone else looking at Defold as a possible solution for their projects, too.

Anyway, ignoring issues that we’ve found work-arounds or temporary solutions for, here are the things at the moment that are causing us concern:

  • Dynamic Sound Loading: For smaller games, the way sound works in Defold is great. For projects such as our own, we will have a lot of dialog files per collection, some amounts of which only need to be loaded under certain circumstances. Without a more dynamic method of loading sound files, we fear that things will get very resource intensive. Even something simple such as having sound objects marked as “inactive” which prevented them from loading their respective files, and then a message could be sent async to them to load the files shortly before they’d be needed would be a great relief from such concerns.
  • Culling: I can’t see any documentation or evidence that the engine does any form of culling to assets that are pushed off the screen. I haven’t properly looked into custom rendering scripts yet, so maybe that’s an avenue for fixing that, but beyond that there doesn’t seem much support for that.
  • Steam: I mentioned this in another comment yesterday, but I’ll repeat it here anyway. We’re aiming for PC platforms only, and fully intend on distributing via Steam. This is something we had already decided on prior to scouting out an engine and is a big ‘must’ on the list.
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#4

Hi @Kruithne!

I’m glad to hear that you are evaluating Defold as the engine for your next project! The engine can do quite a lot, but as you’ve found out yourself it cannot do everything (and it probably never will). Some thought around the missing features:

Dynamic Sound Loading
I recently created a backlog item to design and implement dynamic sound loading, but it will take a while before this feature finds its way into the editor. You could partition your sounds into different collections and load and unload them as needed. This solution should cover most needs, but you cannot load sounds dynamically from downloaded files.

Culling
There is no culling of assets. All game objects will always get lifecycle calls as long as they are enabled.

Steam
I’ve already seen a demo of the extension system loading the steam API and invoking a few functions. The extension system is a really high priority for the team and I’d bet a good deal of money that we will see it released this year. I can’t be more specific than that, maybe it will be released in Q3, maybe in Q4.

Please let me know if you have any more questions regarding the features of Defold!

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#5

Hey @britzl,

Thanks for the quick response! Defold is definitely something we’ve loved experimenting with and does allow a fair amount of flexibility. Overall, we’ve been eager to overcome whatever issues we’ve ran into rather than look for an alternative.

Creating different collections containing the sound files is something that I hadn’t even thought about, but actually seems like a pretty decent solution, especially considering they can loaded asynchronously. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll certainly give that some experimenting later tonight with our tech demo.

When I first picked up Defold, I thought it had culling built in which is something I was impressed by, but that shouldn’t be too hard to create in Lua considering most things can be enabled/disabled. I’m glad to hear we might have something to solve the Steam requirement sometime in the future, I look forward to seeing what comes from that extension system!

#6

Great to hear! Let me know how the experimentation with sound collections work out for you! And yes, culling should be fairly easy to implement in Lua.

#7