These are all good things but I worry that if it is a manual process to update this info it will at some point result in outdated info. If the asset is available on GitHub we can extract additional data about number of releases, date of creation, number of reported issues vs closed and so on.
2 Likes
Absolutely. If on GitHub each asset had a status information file that would be good and have history including dates baked in.
Ideally, what I’d like is a way to gather an actual “usage” count for the extensions/libraries.
That’s the important part I think, to know that they are being used.
Unfortunately, github doesn’t provide this info, so we’d have to build something ourselves.
1 Like
Some pages with tutorials and/or documentation show a timestamp of last edit:
It might help sometimes knowing that some article is from that point in the time. From time to time new users will check out (and thus verify) tutorials and their “up-to-date-ity”, so could post in Forum issues and then we could update the content and the timestamp.
2 Likes
“Not enough code samples and tutorials”
I’m surprised by this. As a new user for about a month or two, I thought the Learn section was fantastic. I was happy with all the sample projects and tutorials that seemed to cover everything at all levels without being overwhelming. I think the learn sections on more popular engines are a bit overwhelming.
As far as “built-in tutorials” like you get in the launcher, I think Defold has the same number as Unity. There are a lot of great sample projects of different complexities toward the bottom. Maybe people are overlooking these. Perhaps move the examples by Britzl, JCash, and Ben James more at the top and make them stand out with an image or something. After I found those, it really helped me with figuring out how I wanted to structure my first simple projects.
I thought the example code in the Examples section was great also. It’s concise without unrelated fluff and almost every line commented to explain what it is doing. Maybe it’s because of the nature of Lua, but to me it is a good contrast to sample code I see in Unity docs - which seemed to often include a lot of unnecessary tricks and use of language features that obfuscated the point of an example code.
I wanted to express what I think is good about the learning documentation to give some ideas on refinement.
9 Likes
I agree. Ever since I started looking at defold I never had the feeling that there were missing documentation. Proof of this is that britzl often replies in forums with a link to an official manula page.
Quite the opposite problem, between tutorials, built-in samples, authors’ samples projects, demos and all that, sometimes there is an overlap. But if people complain about lack of documentation maybe it’s just a discoverability problem.
7 Likes
It’s now been a year since the last user survey and a lot has happened with Defold (hopefully for the better!). Before we send out a new survey we decided to take a look at the things our community disliked last year and compare that to the release notes and other changes we’ve made in the last twelve months. Here’s a summary:
17 Likes
I guess I didn’t realize that features I am dependent upon, in 3D, have only been added in the past year. It was by coincidence that I decided to give Defold a second try, but it is because of the hard work on those updates that I’ve stayed!
I forgot that I bounced off of Defold four years ago because of such a lack of 3D functionality. This blog post jogged my memory. 
3 Likes