Defold roadmap for 2023?

#1

Hi there,

I was wondering is there a Defold roadmap for 2023 already in place?

I for one, have been astonished by the work done on the engine this past year. Compared to other products the pace and quality of updates has been fantastic!

Sadly I feel the editor hasn’t received the same amount of love, with lots of features and/or quality of life improvements missing (I think I have been waiting for convex shapes collision editing for years).
Any update on this front?

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#2

Thanks! We’re also really pleased with the improvements we’ve made during 2022.

It is true that the functionality of the editor hasn’t changed much in 2022. LSP support is probably the most notable addition in recent months. We do have both @mats.gisselson and @vlaaad working on the editor, full time, but their focus has almost completely been on the performance of the editor in very large projects. For normal day-to-day use in a small or average sized project the editor works incredibly well, but during 2022 we saw real-world examples of the editor grinding to a halt when used in really really large projects (take your standard Defold project and multiply that by a hundred), for instance when one resource was referenced many many thousands times, or when saving a big project, or when tabbing back to a project after adding massive amounts of new content to a project. These problems made the editor unusable and we had to focus our development efforts on these problems, setting aside everything else. We’re close to completing the most critical of these, with one remaining task that @mats.gisselson is working on for a few more weeks.

Yes we do have an internal roadmap, but like in 2022 we’ve decided to not share a detailed roadmap. I can share some things we have planned though:

Editor

  • Conditional breakpoints
  • Open project option
  • Lua linter to build errors and warnings
  • Install Android and iOS builds from the bundle dialog

Engine/extensions

  • New GPU based Rive renderer
  • Spine runtime updates (blend modes, masks)
  • Custom vertex formats
  • ARM64 support
  • Improved texture packer
  • Lua memory profiler

There is a lot more planned, but the above are things I can comfortably share without promising too much.

20 Likes
#3

Thanks for the detailed answer. I guess performance and optimizations have triggered some very core work on the editor that we won’t see until is finished.

Looking forward to another great year of updates!

5 Likes