Thoughts after first project

[Vik]

Hi. I finished my college project, I want to talk about the engine.

• Message system: Its a nice system when you get used to, if you use other OOP languages, its weird not to do object.doThis(). the only problem I see is the code length. And you need to use a module for sending data (cant send tables with info (>1kb I think)
• Release: Its easy and simple to do a release for windows.
• Well documented: Nice documentation, but only if you know how the engine works. I think, there is a lot of work to do, with tutorials, explaining how things work, videos, etc ( networking ,udp, tcp, render, camera, shaders, deep use of every component, databases etc)
• Comunity /Bugs/features: The team is improving the engine always, and you can get help in the forum
• Lua: Lua works perfect, and its fun programming with it.

• Lack of tutorials: when you start with defold, the learning curve is too steep, I think this engine would be more used than godot or other engines, if it has more tutorials.
• limitations of the engine by design: using strings in the properties/sending tables. no property in editor for tint a sprite. cant get the children of a collection or gameObject…
• camera: is a pain, need a built in camera , easy and understandable (not a module). a function to move ,a X,Y coordenades converter and a property to set Exaactly what the camera sees. I know the documentation has improved, need to check it in my next project.
  Its a Huge problem , like the lack of tutorials.
• database??: I could not make a database work… I look to, and find the only working option was using playfab, only work in windows 7, never had worked in windows 10 to me… I dont know how people store the data, seems to be a secret…

I think im gonna stay with this, and try to complete a game and continue learning the engine. Thanks.

[Pkeod]

if you use other OOP languages, its weird not to do object.doThis()

You can still do this with Lua. http://lua-users.org/wiki/ObjectOrientedProgramming

I think this engine would be more used than godot or other engines

I agree with this, it needs more visibility such as being on Steam. Some people want the community to stay small and see that as a strength vs the chaos that is the Unity or Epic community but I think there’s still way more community value in having the engine be popular.

camera

I agree that the kind of features Orthographic or RenderCam have should have been builtin, but they’re still easily accessible, and not all problems need to be solved builtin because they are not needed by everyone.

I dont know how people store the data

What do you mean, saving user data to disk or a server?

[Vik]

Server

[britzl]

Thank you for the feedback @Vik! I’m happy to hear that you’re staying with Defold. There’s some things that we can likely improve on:

Lack of tutorials: when you start with defold, the learning curve is too steep,

We can improve here and we are constantly improving the manuals and adding examples. If you were to wish for one new tutorial, what would it cover?

camera: is a pain, need a built in camera , easy and understandable (not a module). a function to move ,a X,Y coordenades converter and a property to set Exactly what the camera sees. I know the documentation has improved, need to check it in my next project.
Its a Huge problem , like the lack of tutorials.

Please check the Camera manual and let me know if it helps. We could probably add some helper functions as well.

database??: I could not make a database work… I look to, and find the only working option was using playfab, only work in windows 7, never had worked in windows 10 to me… I dont know how people store the data, seems to be a secret…

It’s hard to create an out of the box solution for storing game data on a server. You really need to read up and make a choice of a service that suits your needs and you need to integrate with an SDK. Are you aware of a super simple solution in some other engine that we maybe could look into adding in Defold?

[Vik]

A step by step tutorial of a complete multiplayer game and a shader tutorial.

[britzl]

A step by step tutorial of a complete multiplayer game

This is going to require quite a bit of work. Some decisions regarding backend really depends on if it’s turn based or realtime. What’s your preference?

shader tutorial

What is missing from the Shader manual and the ShaderToy tutorial?

[Vik]

What would change if the game is turn based or real time?

Its easy to learn with video examples, you can have all documentation you want, but It doesnt mean that anyone could learn something, or at least me.
water shader, cell shading, how shaders work tutorial for dummies, expert tutorials and so on.

[britzl]

What would change if the game is turn based or real time?

A turn based game would use http requests while a real time game would use UDP and/or TCP socket connections. And this would impact the choice of backend.

For real-time games there’s backend solutions such as Colyseus and Noobhub. And one might want to look into Amazon GameLift for scaling.

[Vik]

real time then. thanks.

[britzl]

water shader, cell shading, how shaders work tutorial for dummies, expert tutorials and so on.

A lot of the stuff regarding shaders in general is in no way specific to Defold. If you find an OpenGL ES video tutorial it is basically 100% relevant to Defold.