Hi There
Just starting out on Lua and Defold - I come from a previous engine that can compile down to native mainly…
So with that in mind, how fast is the engine and is the end code native to the platform…i.e. Android=Java, iOS = Obj C, etc?
If not how does it compare on performance?
Thanks
Since all the code you can express in Defold is lua, that will run slower than native. However, the idea in Defold is to use lua reactively; to initiate features in the engine (which are written in performant C), and then respond to changes in the game, sort of like a glue. An example is initiating an animation, and responding to when that animation has finished by playing a sound or whatever. This completely breaks down if you need to do e.g. procedural animation or anything that needs to go every frame for many different things. Implementing a complex flocking system or physics simulation directly in lua is not a good idea from a perf point of view. This of course depends on how many things needs this type of simulation, and obviously the complexity of the simulation. However, we are working on an alternative to lua that will run with native perf across all platforms, but we can’t give an eta since it’s still sort of RnD. A few years ago we made this demo to show off the anim (tween) system, the demo is entirely scripted in lua. We used images as sources for color and pos, and directed the pixels with lua code, but the anim system changed them over the frames. We also have the neon shooter haxx which is present in the show-reel. All the enemies there are procedurally animated in lua, so you need to get up to quite many things before it becomes a severe issue.
I heard it’s really fast.
Having published the first game from King with this engine I gotta admit that I am very impressed with the speed of this engine. Both on mobile and WebGL.
Of course you can break it and make it go really slow but until this point it has always been a matter of bad code 
Thanks, the Demo looks fast and smooth!
Really nice, if you guys could get at least Admob or Unity ads working soon that would my last hurdle to jump to this