Writing a book on Defold

Any time frame on a updated version?

This month Iā€™ve made progress on example projects and recipes in spare time.

Right now Iā€™m crunching on two major work projects that will be done before the end of the month, very soon. Then Iā€™ll have more time for a while to fully focus on this. Iā€™ll make a commitment to a big update date then.

1 Like

Any news on an update?

Still working on it when I can. The book is updated to Editor 2 now. Iā€™ll publish a new public version by the end of the month.

Some more info:

  • Iā€™ll have lots more time the next three weeks and I want to invest as much of it as I can into finishing this up and getting it fully published and accessible. I kept getting pulled back into normal work projects last few month and it sucks.
  • Iā€™m currently in the process of moving the text project from Scrivener to GitBook. It will be able to be read online for free and downloaded as pdf/epub for free. Once itā€™s up, if anyone would be like to be added as a contributor can be added to edit the book to fix mistakes or add extra details. Iā€™ve not yet written about some of the new features added in the last few updates but Iā€™ll get to doing that soon.
  • The license is being changed to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode this allows free access to read and share, but still allows me to potentially get the book published as a real book so that the publisher still has a legal ability to do so an incentive. If there is no interest from publishers after a while though Iā€™ll make it completely public domain, or transfer the ownership of the project entirely to the Defold team if they would like to control it.
  • Iā€™ll be removing the book from sale soon. Iā€™ll publish some full game example projects as buyer exclusives for a few months at least as thanks for those who purchased. Iā€™ll also ask the buyers soon if they would like their names + company links added into the front of the book as thanks for supporting it.
  • What funds were raised Iā€™m still planning to use to pay someone to translate at least some of the text to a worthwhile language. As of today, there have been 54 pre-purchase sales, which means thereā€™s about 1.3k to pay for translation. Mandarin Chinese with Simplified text probably but Iā€™m open to any better suggestions. There is not enough $ for even a complete text translation for a single language, but Iā€™ll cover the rest for at least the first language when itā€™s decided and we have a good person to do it. If anyone would like to donate translations too contact me. I would be willing to make a deal with people where: if you translate the project, and agree to put it online as cc-by-nc-nd 4.0 then you can publish a physical form with a publisher, sell it, and keep 100% of what they pay you. You just have to understand that Defold is still new, doesnā€™t have a large userbase yet, and efforts like these should not be considered commercial first but about helping to grow userbase so that we can all benefit from larger community.
  • Iā€™ll make a new thread soon ā€œBig List of Defold Example Projectsā€? and begin to publish zips with various other interesting stand alone examples without much explanation but may still be interesting for people to dig into to learn. Lots of experiments and tests which donā€™t fit well elsewhere.
  • Once this is all up, I want to do two other sort of large projectsā€¦ ā€œDefold All In Oneā€ as an exercise of using the majority of existing Defold features in a single project chapter by chapter and ā€œDefold 30ā€ ( inspired by https://javascript30.com/ )a set of 30 video tutorials with start and end example projects going through quickly implementing specific useful game features. Meant to be done once over a 30 day period one day at a time. All will be entirely free, and Iā€™ll most likely publish them directly into the public domain. Iā€™ll be working all of the rest of this month, and if I can get away with it all of January on this too.

Future is bright! :fire:

13 Likes

Thank you for sharing an update @Pkeod! Your plans all sound very reasonable. Good luck!

1 Like

Thanks for the update and the hard work. On my side I can offer an italian translation as a way to contribute to the project. i think it deserves it.

3 Likes

Thank you for the update! :smiley:

1 Like

@Pkeod Thanks for the hard work and the update! Awesome job!

2 Likes

@Pkeod, Iā€™m am a Volunteer translator ( English -> Brazilian Portuguese ).

My last jobs were:

To translate these videos we had use the amara.org plataform.

Soā€¦ if you acceptā€¦ I can help you with the brazilan portuguese.

3 Likes

Thanks for the update, looking forward to seeing it completed :slight_smile:

1 Like

Progress on getting the text up:

Itā€™s a little mind numbing doing all of the formatting and setup so Iā€™ve been going kind of slow but itā€™s getting done!

8 Likes

WOW!!! thats amazing! thank you man!!!

1 Like

Great!! Thanks!

Online reading showing error. ā€œFailed to ungzip body:EOFā€

When does this happen? I canā€™t seem to reproduce.

If it happens again please post a screenshot? Iā€™ll report the issues to GitBook devs.

Hey @Pkeod iā€™m reading your book. there are amazing tips. But about the thread to translate it to others languagesā€¦

What is yout plan (strategy) to do it?

  1. The volunteer is free to create another gitBook account and translate? or
  2. or the gitBook offers support to multiple languages?
  3. or is there another way?
3 Likes

They appear to support multiple languages but Iā€™ve not tested yet.

https://toolchain.gitbook.com/languages.html

What Iā€™m going to do soon is add the gitbook project to a github repo which is automatically synced, and then I can add contributors to the github repo who can add translations. Then it should hopefully just work to have

https://read.bookofdefold.com/en/
https://read.bookofdefold.com/ru/
https://read.bookofdefold.com/de/

and so on. And other volunteers / defold team members who are added to the git as admins can accept pull requests for text corrections / additions over time.

Please wait until I setup the github repo before doing translation so you can work from the raw files. I still have more setup work to do that Iā€™ve not had time to do yet.

6 Likes

OK iā€™m keep waiting your signal to start it

3 Likes

Pkeod - It seems that the book on github wasnā€™t updated in the last 7 months - do you have plans on finishing it? I really try to like Defold but there are some things that I really donā€™t like and a book on the engine might help me getting started (for example the rotation system using quaternions - why canā€™t I get a simple rotate() method? Also the message system which relies on stringsā€¦).

1 Like