I have worked with different software and game engines since way back in the previous century. This has made me very cautious adding and using extensions mostly due to lack of updates and support and over developing time it may crash your project or at least give issues.
With that said and the recommendations for various extensions on this forum, what is your thoughts and experience with this with Defold?
Which extensions are solid and if possible, supported by the Defold team?
“Extension” is a somewhat vague term. An extension can be a simple Lua module or a Native extensions .
Lua modules are just Lua—nothing special about them. You can easily fix them if you run into issues.
Native extensions(C/C++/Java/Swift etc.) are a bit different. Most of them are very solid. They are not like those poorly made JavaScript NPM packages.
If a Extension is old or not frequently updated, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad; it could just be because it is already stable.
What kind of support are you looking for? Almost every Defold extension is open source, so you can contribute or ask the developer to fix it for a reasonable fee. Alternatively, you can choose to develop the same functionality from the ground up by investing your time and effort.
This is part of being a developer, I guess. Your code might fail you too!
Beside Defold official extensions, a lot of community ones are also working and used in games, including published. Some of the solid ones are from active forum members here. If you want to use particular library and you are wondering whether it is good to use or not - try it or ask on forum before. Some of us for sure will answer whether it is good choice or an example of an abandoned or not updated extension (there are some like that, yes)
One more tip - repos have Stars - it is at least some kind of indication of repo popularity. Sometimes raised and solved issues show popularity, especially for old and stable repos, it might show how much work has been additionally put into improving it.
My veeery subjective list of worth basic modules/extensions would be (some of them are mine, so it’s indeed veery subjective):
GUI: Druid, Gooey
Screen managing: Monarch,
Saving: Defold Saver / DefSave / Defold Persist
Messaging/Events: Defold Event / Pigeon / britzl’s Broadcast from Ludobits / Dispatcher from Crit / Defold Hashed
Logging: Defold Log / Squid / Log / Err
Camera: Defold Orthographic, Defold Rendy
Input: Defold Input
Other: Defold Sharp Sprite, Defold Ads Wrapper (if you have ads), DefOS, 2 packs of libraries: Crit, Ludobits
There are a lot of assets for 2D games, ones based on tilemaps and 3D games too
Lume and Knife are also great Lua generic libraries with a ton of useful utilities functions
Your code might fail you too!
