I believe this is the repository you’re looking for https://github.com/defold/extender
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For my part, I’m very happy that the source code for Defold has become available. This is a huge step forward for both users and the team.
First of all, it is a great help to me to more accurately understand the internal operation of the engine and thus create even more optimized games. If unexplained errors occur, I can even determine the causes myself and look for workarounds.
I mostly follow the forum and Defold developments on a daily basis for several years. It has become apparent to me that the pace of development of Defold has slowed down in the recent past for some reason. This step could accelerate improvements in the future. I am sure that over time there will be more and more people who will contribute in some way to the development of the amazing Defold.
Thanks to the Defold Foundation for making it all possible!
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Now I just hope that, “It’s open source, so you can fix it/figure it out yourself!” doesn’t become the default answer to bug reports, feature requests, and questions about how the engine works. I got this answer a lot when using an open source game engine in the past, and it was extremely frustrating. Particularly to a beginner who may be struggling to learn basic programming with lua, suggesting they wade through thousands of lines of code in multiple other languages is a bit inconsiderate. It’s awesome that Defold is open source now, but this doesn’t change anything for the vast majority of users. (except to give them that little warm fuzzy feeling :P)
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I agree. The reason I (and probably most developers here) use an engine in the first place is to reduce the time from idea to released game.
The fact that tools like Defold exist at all, and for free, is the reason I have the luxury of making games for a living. Fuzzy feeling doesn’t even begin to describe it!
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I am hoping many of the vast majority of users choose to support Defold over time. 
I agree that for gamedevs they should be able to focus on making the game and not making the tools to make the game. But we can still give back both with code and with money!
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We will continue to work in more or less the same fashion with releases every four weeks, two weeks of beta testing, according to a roadmap defined by the foundation.
Things that will change is that we invite the community to contribute bug fixes etc and get more involved in the actual development, but we will not rely on this.
We will do our absolute best to continue to support the community. This will now also include support new contributors to help the get familiar with the code.
Another thing that will change is that the Defold Foundation will try to enter corporate partnerships with game tech companies. Some of these partnerships may involve development work in collaboration with the partner company, which will influence the direction of development.
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@britzl Oh, that reminds me, in the FAQ you have:
We will also not accept contributions that aren’t in line with our roadmap.
Is there a public roadmap?
I’m assuming that that quote was meant in a more general, “contributions must fit the Defold project goals” rather than, “we won’t accept contributions for anything that wasn’t already planned in our roadmap”.
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We posted a high level roadmap a while back.
There’s also the GitHub project: https://github.com/defold/defold/projects/27
I will make sure to rephrase the text your quoted. It is not entirely correct. We’re happy to accept contributions that fixes existing bugs or solves feature request (if we have agreed they are a good idea). We will not accept contributions for new features that have not been discussed with the community and Defold team.
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I removed the sentence entirely. It was simply not true.
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Epic Megagrant could come in handy 
Defold foundation gets funding, Epic gets more users, devs get free online services
It’s a win,win,win. 
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Epic funding the support of their games services to work with Defold would be cool! Worth a shot to apply to see if they would support the project like they have with other gamedev tools.
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Yes, Epic is on our radar. Does anyone have a contact there?
A good first step would be for an official from the Defold Foundation to fill out the application form on the page https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
Possibly they would be interested in long term support. I don’t have any good contacts for Epic myself right now. You could try reaching out to Tim Sweeney directly but I would still fill out the form first. The people who review the applications will eventually approve or reject.
3 Likes
Hey!
I took a look at the roadmap and noticed 3D support, what do you think that will end up looking like? Will it bring the engine closer to that of unity and unreal in the 3D sense?
Which specific 3D features do you want to see? In the sense of bringing Defold closer to Unity or Unreal?
It makes no sense for us to compete with Unreal and Unity, trying to catch up to them. Godot seems to be going in that direction and the competition in that space is fierce. Defold has found a niche for itself and we believe we can make improvements to 3D support without compromising on our existing strengths. Some things on our list:
Custom collision shapes for 3D physics - We recently added runtime creation and manipulation of meshes (https://defold.com/manuals/mesh/) and we want to be able to use the meshes as collision shapes.
Improved Collada importer - The current importer is very bare bones with support for only a single mesh.
Improved model animations
Updated render API - We want to design a new render API to break out of the limitations of OpenGL ES 2.0 and leverage the vulkan support we’re soon shipping.
Improve snapping and alignment features in the Defold editor:
- Absolute snap-to-grid
- Snap to point
- Snap to surface
- Adjustable pivot (so you can rotate around an arbitrary point or snap an arbitrary point to another)
- Discrete rotate (step rotate in snapped angle steps)
- Align and distribute objects based on bounding boxes.
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Mainly the stuff that @britzl had just covered in response to my recent comment. Dedicated 3d rendering, dedicated 3d scene editor, that type of stuff. Also, a dedicated lighting system would be a great plus.
I’m looking forward to Defold’s future!
4 Likes