What can I do if Defold doesn't have a feature I need, but my game is almost ready for release?

Questions
#1

What can I do if Defold doesn’t have a feature I need, but my game is almost ready for release?

Example situation; I have almost completed my game for Computer OS(s). Fans are expecting the game soon. But, the game requires the mouse to be replaced with a Game Object, and requires it to be locked to the game window. Features that are currently in the backlog, but are not available at this time.

Do I have to wait until the features are added naturally, or will Defold/King assist me as a developer to add the required features? (And I don’t mean putting everything else aside and working on it.)

I will keep using Defold because it’s amazing so far. The community, the workflow of the engine itself, the constant feedback from the engine developers. It’s really great. However… Writing code for an entire game only to wait an untold time frame for a required feature doesn’t sound… Appealing?

I am however continuing to use Defold no matter the situation. There’s nothing else like it unless I want to shovel out money for one and use a whole new API, Language, and Engine.

TL;DR; Does Defold/King help with developers missing features before release?

P.S. I feel like I’m being a donkey, but I can’t think of a better way to word this question. So I’m really sorry if it comes off as rude. It’s not my intention.

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#2

Hiding hardware mouse cursor I’m 99% sure is possible right now but requires you to do some extra work with native functions. I am planning to do it eventually if it’s not added to the engine already. Look here for guidance:

https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#pdf-package.loadlib

Defold uses GLFW 2 so you would need to look up the docs for that to find which functions to call to do what you want.

http://www.glfw.org/GLFWReference27.pdf

Defold teams is working on a system which will make native functions much more easy to setup and be more cross platform friendly. When that’s available it will be the preferred way to do this.

If you can think of features which you 100% need to release you should outline them and make it clear. And then you should make the decision if you can compromise on them, or try to find workable solutions. Ultimately you should use the engine which is right for your project. The facts are that Defold is currently preferred toward mobile game releases, but is missing crucial features for real commercial desktop PC builds. Some of these features very likely have solutions that us users could do but it will require someone investing the time into making them work.

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#3

I’m sorry, it was a poor example situation. But I meant a situation where a feature wasn’t possible to be added by the end user and would have to be done at the engine level.

However, thank you very much for this information! I will be pouring myself over it and doing further research into this! Hiding the mouse was only a problem that was brought up by my comrades in code, and wasn’t a current problem for my project. But this information will really help the problems we are facing now. Thank you again!

#4

Hi @Zeriga!

Fyi, the show/hide mouse cursor is being worked on right now and, if nothing extraordinary happens, it should be done in the 1.2.94 release (I think it just misses the 1.2.93 release I’m afraid). The tricky part is getting consistent behaviour on html5, where it works quite differently.

However, it’s a very good, bigger question that you ask and, personally, I’d like to think that by simply having a dialog (just like this one, but a little earlier), we can hopefully come up with a “due date” for when a cliff hanger feature is needed, on a case by case basis. That usually helps in making the planning/decisions, so such a feature can be moved up in the schedule. That’s how we work with internal teams too.
I think this is in line with what @Oleg_The_Evangelist said here: “…our ideas range from direct technical help…”. Again, this is my personal view/interpretation of things, so it’s not a guarantee that it will work this way in practise.

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#5

Thank you for replying with this information! (It’s also good to know the mouse feature will be added soon!) If it’s really a simple matter of talking about it to you wonderful folk then that’s great news.

I think when I have something to show I’ll show it, and also talk about some features I would need if I haven’t already managed them with Pkeod’s method. (Right now, the game is a bunch of boxes.)

#6

I think @Mathias_Westerdahl puts it really well. Still I think it’s important to say that you should be careful about relying on us for specific dates. As much as we would like to give guarantees, in reality we are never able to do so. I often tell people they should wait for things they need to be released before fully committing to our tech. But also like @Mathias_Westerdahl said we try hard to solve things as they come up because we f•cling love game dev and we care about this.
As @Pkeod mentioned we are indeed working on an extension system to make us less of a bottle neck.

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