King launches a clone Gideros game engine: Defold

jdbc

http://nordicgamebits.com/2015/10/05/kings-defold-engine-publicly-available/

King has launched a Lua-based game engine
http://www.defold.com/

It looks quite similar to Gideros: Free, 2D, Lua programming language, live WIFI debugging... King company is copying again someone, in this case Gideros Mobile Framework ideas.

Anyway they have added some interesting features: vector class, colaborative integration, collision class, ... some of them I miss in Gideros. May be Gideros could copy Defold ideas too.

yaxxar

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

jdbc

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

Have you looked at the website? They have built a Lua game engine (beta) similar to Gideros. King is expanding its business model.

They have launched their Game Studio as free and synchronize code with Git to their servers. I mean King uses a Lua framework!!!

I got an invitation here: http://www.defold.com/ggj16

yaxxar

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

Have you looked at the website? They have built a Lua game engine (beta) similar to Gideros. King is expanding its business model.

They have launched their Game Studio as free and synchronize code with Git to their servers. I mean King uses a Lua framework!!!

I got an invitation here: http://www.defold.com/ggj16

Yeah I looked on the website, and yes all free and looks very good, but I was joking my experience playing King Games like Candy Crush or Bubble Witch Saga 2 :O) , but the top point of this is that Gideros is taking as a base for Defold, and with this, Gideros can take a more more important place/name on the Game Development, and or course, Lua coding can be more knowed by the game developers! All is growing up!

Tom2012

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

I read the site but I couldn't see this part. Is there business model to charge for each compile a test build, or the real build, or something different?

yaxxar

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

I read the site but I couldn't see this part. Is there business model to charge for each compile a test build, or the real build, or something different?

Sorry, is just a joke about how King make money with their games, like Candy Crush you have 5 lifes, if you wasted all of them, you could wait a few hours to recover the 5 lifes, or you can pay for the 5 lifes if you don t want to wait, or you can send a request for lifes to your friends on Facebook, a very high count of King ' s Games do the same, thats why King is very known as a greedy company.

Sorry again, the joke that I said about Defold is not part of the framework, I surfed few minutes ago the website, all seems to be free

ar2rsawseen

Cmon, I thought that was a pretty funny joke, laughed a lot.

Looks like other's did not play Candy Crush, or have not heard about King trademarking Candy and other words and doing trademark trolls

ar2rsawseen

Got a look at it more closesly, and yes while it seems there are some great features.

Couple of things completely put me of, for example, like seeing this menu:



Really, I need to know all of this files and understand what they do and when to use them?

Or for example code:

function init(self) -- Send a message to the render script (see builtins/render/default.render_script) to set the clear color. -- This changes the background color of the game. The vector4 contains color information -- by channel from 0-1: Red = 0.2. Green = 0.2, Blue = 0.2 and Alpha = 1.0 msg.post("<a href="http://forum.gideros.rocks/profile/render" rel="nofollow">@render</a>:", "clear_color", { color = vmath.vector4(0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0) } )   -- Acquire input focus so we can react to input msg.post(".", "acquire_input_focus")   -- Some variables self.steer_angle = vmath.quat() self.direction = vmath.quat()   -- Velocity and acceleration are car relative (not rotated) self.velocity = vmath.vector3() self.acceleration = vmath.vector3() end

msg.post

Send a message to the render script (see builtins/render/default.render_script) to set the clear color

I need to post a message with some parameters to change some color somewhere? What is that?

I really think it is overly complicated. Maybe if you learn all the things underneath, you could benefit more (and probably it is that way) but all in all, at least for me, I can't justify learning all that now



but maybe it is just me.

But I really like to write everything in code, than having over 10 different file types, like input binding to actions, and then action binding to functions, etc And need to learn all those formats and how they work.

SinisterSoft

@Tom2012 he is joking.

I look a look, it looks ok but not as good as Gideros. Gideros needs to pinch some of its features though.

SinisterSoft

I think they are using messages and having the rendering system operate on a different thread to the Lua thread (core if a multicore cpu)?

totebo

This looks very similar to Gideros and at first glance impressive. Wonder if it's as easy to get things running as Gideros.

Tom2012

@yaxxar

LOL! My appologies I get it now.

Some cool things I noticed:

- Built in particle engine
- Support for IK with Spine
- Wifi testing (not sure why more frameworks don't do this...
- HTML5 support

Downside - too many unknowns. Learning new framework, no idea how fast it is, unfamiliar IDE etc. Looks cool but I'll be sticking with the big 'G'.

SinisterSoft

@totebo at second glance some of the stuff looks very awkward to use, etc...

Redpicman

I personally will be sticking with gideros because it is open source. These non open source solutions tend to come and go quickly unless they are supported heavily from the start. Still thats my 2 pence. But I guess ultamately the "Market" will decide.

totebo

@SinisterSoft I'm not sure if I get the messaging system (what about events?) and not sold on the game objects. Probably need to play a bit with it to see how it works.

jdbc

Yeah I looked on the website, and yes all free and looks very good, but I was joking my experience playing King Games like Candy Crush or Bubble Witch Saga 2 :O) , but the top point of this is that Gideros is taking as a base for Defold, and with this, Gideros can take a more more important place/name on the Game Development, and or course, Lua coding can be more knowed by the game developers! All is growing up!

Yes I know but this is the winner game model, for the moment. Diamond Dash, Candy Crush and Bubble Witch use the same social and economic model, but it works!

The great thing is that most downloaded mobile and HTML games are developed in Lua and a similar way than Gideros does.

jdbc

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

I read the site but I couldn't see this part. Is there business model to charge for each compile a test build, or the real build, or something different?

At the beginning I thought the same, King release free a game engine but you must purchase for every 5 builds or similar. Good joke, but it could be possible.

jdbc

I personally will be sticking with gideros because it is open source. These non open source solutions tend to come and go quickly unless they are supported heavily from the start. Still thats my 2 pence. But I guess ultamately the "Market" will decide.

We can get the good things about Defold game engine: Collision, vectors and git integration. Gideros should integrate those things.

totebo

After checking out Defold's reference manual, it's clear that Gideros has one major advantage: Plugins. The only native device services Defold supports appear to be IAP and push notifications at the moment.

If that's true, Defold games are unable to easily use common Gideros features such as ads(!), GameKit, Google Play services, Facebook or Twitter.

I wonder if this is the case, or if I'm missing something.

jdbc

I think they are using messages and having the rendering system operate on a different thread to the Lua thread (core if a multicore cpu)?

I guess this is the goal, quite similar to Message queue in asynchronous threads for Android programming. The difference with Gideros is that Defold seems to provide a more abstract application arquitecture and application lifecycle. Gideros could learn from Defold anyway and take the good features.

vitalitymobile

It is more likely Unity than Gideros. They have GameObject, with Script as component ...
About Message System, I think Gideros Event System is more better. Or if we want to use system like that, we can use https://github.com/daveyang/EventDispatcher

simwhi

It looks very interesting. I will take a closer look when I have some time. However, I did notice that they have a few full tutorials/examples to get a developer started. We should definitely copy that idea.

phongtt

The IDE is based on Eclipse.

phongtt

And you have only 5 chances to compile your code, if you waste all the chances you must wait, or pay some money or send to your programmers friends a request for "compile lives". )

I used to be a Candy Crush addict so I immediately ROFL when seeing this haha.

john26

They say it's free on the website but what exactly does that mean I wonder? Even if free now they could restrict it later if not open source...

jdbc

They say it's free on the website but what exactly does that mean I wonder? Even if free now they could restrict it later if not open source...

Free for the moment, I guess it is not a game engine to consider for this reason. They can change the user's agreement when they want. Indie developers should go to free and open source game engines.

totebo

This old video confuses things...

jdbc

This old video confuses things...

It seems that Defold was adquired by King two years ago...

ar2rsawseen

What scares me the most, is that if it is free, then you are paying for it in some other way.
And the fact that you sync code with their server might be a clue

jdbc

What scares me the most, is that if it is free, then you are paying for it in some other way.
And the fact that you sync code with their server might be a clue

I was thinking the same, source code is submitted to King's servers. Sure they used it to make their own games or something similar. Anyway Bitbucket could do the same thing, so many source codes available and so many money to earn with it. Who's going to control if the source code is used by someone before?

totebo

Whoa there @jdbc! I think it's (very, very) unlikely that a company like King would keep source code to make their own games. Let's report back when we have the facts.