My First Impressions

Feature requests
#1

Hi everyone. I’ve just started testing the engine, matter of fact i’ve been testing game engines for a long time, it’s a hobby of mine :slight_smile: Anyways, i’m almost finishing the Getting Started tutorial, and have some suggestions, many of them may already have been discussed on the forum:

  1. It would be nice to add more customization to the editor, at least custom syntax highlighting options.

  2. Code editor needs better code completion. Things like, name of variables, functions, methods of objects, engine objects etc.

  3. Collision object “Group” and “Mask” should be editable dropdowns. You select existing values or type a new one.

  4. The editor should allow dragging an dropping asssets, scripts etc. to Game Objects.

I understand those are mostly editor related, and since you’re working on a new editor i hope those will get fixed then.

A final thing. I’m on Windows 10 x64. The example game from Getting Started tutorial runs perfectly in the editor, but when i export as Windows Application it lags noticeable , not terribly but noticeable. Sometimes it normalizes after a few seconds , sometimes don’t. Appears to be garbage collector related or something, don’t know.

That’s it. Other than that the enginee is really well organized , flexible and easy to use. Thanks!

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#2

Thanks for sharing your first impressions. The new editor should hopefully solve some of the things you’ve listed. I haven’t heard any issue with lag on Windows. @sven, do you know anything about this?

#3

Good tips, especially about code/variable completion. I miss that from Sublime. Otherwise, I’m loving the engine and what it supplies, first two days with it have been fun.

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#4

Yeah code completion is really important, specially to quick explore the API. But textual auto complete is important too , saves you from typing self.property dozen of times or a name of a function etc.

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#5

There is code completion of the Defold APIs. You can type for instance “gui.” and when you press the ‘.’ character you should get a list of all the available functions, their arguments etc

You can also enable a keybinding for something called Content Assist which will when invoked try to complete whatever word it is you are typing based on already existing words in open script files. It’s a kind of fuzzy code complete that can be pretty useful.

The new editor we’re working on should once it’s more mature have better code complete and be able to provide code completion for not only Defold APIs but the Lua APIs as well as code from required modules.

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#6

I haven’t noticed this “lag” myself, are you using “variable_dt”?
However, when I tried just now to compare a “Build and launch” instance to a bundled version of the same project, there seemed to be a discrepancy between the delta time in each instance (the bundled version “seemed” to run faster). Will log this as a bug: DEF-1603

#7

Yeah i’m using dt. The update loop is clearly not running the same in Windows export as in the editor. In the editor the platforms animate smoothly. In the export they drag quite a bit. It’s a timing problem probably as you’ve said.

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#8

Tested HTML5 bundle. Problem does not occur there. Timing is smooth. Even though it lags quite a bit from time to time, probably garbage collection related. So the problem you registered as DEF-1603 could be the culprit on Windows Bundle.

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#9

Lack of drag-n-drop -functionality is bugging me as well and people have complained about this before.
I couldn’t find a ticket on this in our system so I created one

#10

Hi there!

I experienced something weird with the bundled version too, that didn’t happen when running from the editor. The graphics updates stutter irregularly. Maybe I get a second of fluid animation, then I get some drops on FPS. I tried with both variable_dt and fixed. I got this behaviour in Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7, when in windowed mode. Doesn’t happen at full screen.

Maybe it is something related?

#11

Yes, the game from Getting Started tutorial lags considerably enough in both Windows and HTML5 mode. So unfortunately I have to give up the idea to use the engine for my game project. I run it on the laptop Core i5, GeForce 720M

I wonder if is this so rare occasion and everybody else have it running smooth?

#12

Can you enable the visual profiler with the code snippet here and show us a screenshot of the results? We might be able to identify the cause of the problem. Might be a v-sync thing, I had some really odd problems with that on an 860m a while back.

Some technical stuff:

The 720m has a processing rate of 240 GFLOPS. That’s not stellar even compared to some of the newer integrated GPUs, but it still seems like it should be more than enough to run the getting started tutorial at a perfect 60 fps in the native Windows build. As far as the i5, even if it’s an older second (first?) gen processor, should be plenty to handle the project.

Oh, also, I’m currently using an Intel HD 530 (441 GFLOPS, so a little less than twice the rate) to run my game, and it runs fine even at 3480x2160 - following that logic, the Nvidia card should definitely be able to push 60 fps on a default sized window.

#13

Thanks for trying to help, here is the screenshot:

defold.jpg1295×756 64.5 KB

and some more info considering web mode: when switching to fullscreen the jerks disappear and after switching back it still runs smooth but every time launching it fresh lagging is at place

#14

Check your graphics card settings, try to force vsync on for the exe.

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#15

So after I have installed the latest card driver version and forced using video card in prefrences isntead of the integrated one the problem was nearly solved. The windows mode smooth ideally, the web version lags for the first few seconds after which stabilizes to almost good(only from time to time hardly noticable jerks). But I have to made conclusion that produced output code for html5 is not satisfactory because similar functionality made with the help of dedicated html5 engines like treejs performed ideally with my outdated driver and former settings. The question is: it is inevitable “pay” for being crossplatform that html5 code is worse that that of treejs? is any work planned (or being performed) to optimize html5 output?

#16

Just to be clear you made your HTML5 test builds with release enabled? Defold team has said they are still working on improving the HTML5 target.

#17

Yes, with release checked

#18

If the problems currently are too great you should use the right engine that works for you - it’s completely possible even with more effort to improve it these issues never get fixed (I see stuttering as HTML5 game apps begin, and periodic stuttering as HTML5 games go on - maybe to do with GC)… But at least know Defold will be improved over time, and it still does have some really great advantages already over other tools.

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