Some generic questions

Questions
#1

Hi folks

I have just found this engine and had a few generic questions which I hope you guys can help with:

  1. Tilemap support: I want to work on staggered isometric maps. is there support for importing Tiled maps?
  2. Debugging. What tools are there to do debugging and optimizations? Whats your opinion of the tools?
  3. Performance: Do we have any existing benchmarks for this engine? I’d love to see a simple animated bunnymark and a max actors benchmark for the engine.
  4. Why do we need an online component for compiling at all? can someone explain?
  5. How easy is it to use existing Lua libs in this engine? For example, I like Jumper for my pathfinding needs. Can I simply require it in my code and expect it to work without any issues?

thanks and regards.

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#2

I am not a part of the Defold team, but can give my views and opinions on your questions:

  1. No there is no support for Tiled maps. To my knowledge there is currently no native support for staggered isometric maps.
  2. You can read more about debugging on http://www.defold.com/doc/debugging, but with hot reloading being so quick I find myself using pprints for 95% of all debugging
  3. I have not seen any benchmarks, but this is for the Defold team to answer
  4. I am not really sure what you are referring to here
  5. Very easy, all Lua library works more or less out of the box. I use Jumper myself and I think I had to change some small thing in order for it to compile, and I have also written a wrapper that takes a Defold Tilemap and creates a Grid from it, but generally it was very straight forward
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#3

As for benchmarks, the engine is very lightweight. There is no concept of an “actor” so it’s hard to know what to expect from such benchmarks. That said we might look into some benchmarks that we feel are relevant. Will post if that happens.

#4

Regarding benchmarks, you can easily check the performance on any target platform of interest by using our profiling facilities. There is an onscreen profiler which you can activate by doing: http://www.defold.com/ref/sys#toggle_profile.
There is also a web based profiler which is better for sampling. More info about the profilers: http://www.defold.com/doc/debugging

By online component, I assume you are referring to having to be signed in to open a project? It is a heritage from a time when Defold was marketed as a subscription based web service. It will be removed in time, so that you can open projects while being offline.

#5

Thanks everyone for chiming in.

I will try to create a simple bunnymark over the next few days. It will be a nice & tiny starting project.

And i was confused about the online part as It didnt seem it was doing anything. Your explanation clears all my doubts regarding that.

Is there a public roadmap list that I can keep an eye on?
I’d like to know which all features are being worked upon and their target releases.

Also, any plans on adding Tiled support? for 2d games, Tiled and Overlap2D are the 2 defacto map editors/level designers and their official support will be fantastic.

#6

Tiled has support for many different export formats, JSON being one of them. Writing a json to Defold tilemap importer should be trivial. @Andreas_Jirenius can probably share his experience of doing exactly this.

Support for TMX TileMaps
#7

Note that Tiled allows rotation and flipping of tiles (among other things), something that is currently not supported in Defold.

#8

Hi

I have used Tiled for several games and it’s very easy to create an exporter yourself.
As @britzl mentioned, Tiled comes with several export formats including lua and json.
In Blossom Blast Saga we used the hexagon map data to create the levels with a custom exporter.
At www.livecoding.tv you can find me setting up Tiled for a very simple game just to show one way how it could be done.
I’m not sure any generic built in export/import support for Tiled in Defold would help so much as you really want to customize your export to your specific game ( in Blossom Blast Saga we create all tiles as specific gameobjects as we want to be able to create interactive blockers and design them in Tiled but in the demo-project in livecoding I use a tilemap because I just want to draw a static map with not much logic ).

Hope it will help you forward.

/Andreas

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