Defold is awesomely unique

Just wanted to say that I really admire Defold, begin open source and professional at the same time! It keeps the focus on providing the minimum platform that provides stable minimalistic cross-platform with tools like editor (that does not claim that it does everything, it just gives you a set of tools that you really need) and all of the native extensions that target people that want to release something that they know it will work without worrying about devices support. Thank you very much about this. Unity does that but at the same time it forces you to do alot of things its way + it is bloated (just to be the ring that rules them all) and not open source.

What I am missing at the moment (and I know all are being worked on):

  • Easier way to control everything inside the extensions instead of Lua only. I know things are being improved at the moment. I think it is designed like (Lua + Native extensions SDK) because Defold was closed source at the beginning, but now if everything can be opened to the extensions it would be great since it is an open source engine (or if it is for safety the SDK needs to have the same level of Lua’s go API).
  • Visual Timeline and Animation (tweening) editor.
  • Adding C (not C++) source code directly to extension’s the awesome (and again unique) build system. Now a days C is gaining popularity again with single-header libs made with C instead of C++ to increase portability between languages.

Thank you again for this great project and for open sourcing it.

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Thanks!

Yes, this is something we want to enable, and it is definitely something that will happen this year as some of that work aligns well with other tasks we have planned for Q2. (New roadmap will be shared soon)

Yep, this is one of the most requested features and it’s something we hope we can find funding to work on!

We like C as well. I’m not sure what is required to support this though. @JCash will know.

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As @britzl mentioned, we’re planning even more additions to our dmSDK, They’ll come bit by bit, as it takes planning and consideration when moving an internal api into a public api.

Adding C (not C++) source code directly to extension’s the awesome

Adding proper C support is something that would be nice, but it requires some changes to the build.yml and the extender server. We haven’t prioritized it since it’s still very possible to compile the C code (most of it at least) as C++ code. Another workaround is of course to make a library and use that instead.

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