Defold engine code overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25569224 - Dec 2020 (45 comments)
The Defold engine code style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23371705 - May 2020 (6 comments)
Defold game engine source now available and free to use for commercial games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232648 - May 2020 (293 comments)
Defold: 2D Game Engine by King.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11352546 - March 2016 (87 comments)
Here's why King gave away its 2D mobile game engine Defold - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321802 - March 2016 (12 comments)
Defold: Free 2D Game Engine for Cross-Platform Publishing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10607837 - Nov 2015 (2 comments)
Defold - Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791284 - Nov 2012 (44 comments)
Unless your team's business model is to _be a Unity team_, it is a matter of determine your goals, evaluate options, get buy-in then start making changes every day to generate that outcome. Don't sell it as a "I hate Unity." Sell it as "it is time to consider how we maintain our future by diversify our skills."
I think many hobby game developers don't realize the astounding important of designer oriented tools. Even most game companies have coders create designer oriented gui tools for games to be more productive.
Whatever open source engine cracks an easy 3d player controller, dialogue system, human retargeted animation system, and easy editor extensions will KILL the competition asap.
Game editors have pretty much all arrived at the Unity scene model and editor workflow (game object outliner to the left, scene view in the middle, property panel on the right, asset browser at the bottom, plus floating panels for things like animations, material definitions, game specific data, or anything else really - everything needs to be extensible through scripting).
The Unity Editor and asset pipeline is hackable enough to use it as editor for another engine, I did that in the past as "proof of concept" and it definitely works, but is most likely a legal minefield.
Blender is also definitely hackable enough to serve that role (see: https://armory3d.org/) (again I did something similar in the past with Maya, it kinda works, but this wasn't very popular with artists because they were overwhelmed by the unfamiliar and complex Maya UI).
PS: the Defold examples page is actually really cool, with realtime examples running in the browser:
I really wonder how dangerous it is legally. I'm already been (slowly) writing a rust tool to convert some Unity .meta for bevy engine before the Unity pricing crisis.
- https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine - https://wickedengine.net/
The first video on Steam seems to show a dialog system.
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967460/Wicked_Engine/
(How are you supposed to create lists in hacker news comments?)
Unity has no this built-in.
> dialogue system,
Neither.
> human retargeted animation system
Unity has a built-on one but it's shitty.
If a new game engine emerged with these, they could take most of unity's market share without needing an asset store of their own.
It's actually worse than that, though, because it goes out of its way to obscure the license terms; in this instance, they're going for association with the cachet and warm fuzzies of the Apache license by throwing that name around, despite not actually being Apache licensed. This is not the result of oversight or ignorance. It's intentionally deceptive.
For anyone who thinks that I'm reading between the lines and overstating this, you can refer to the last time this came up. They received sufficient pushback about their messaging. They're not just aware of the discrepancy between the consensus definition and the way they're using it, they acknowledged it explicitly. In response, they said, "We are humbled [...] also sorry for misrepresenting the license" and that "We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term"[1]. In 2023, there's a big fat nav item at the top of the site that says "Open Source". You click it and read the fine print which gradually reveals the truth of the matter. The "open source" part refers (apparently?) to... their extension ecosystem?
Everything about this screams, "We know exactly what we're doing, but we're going about it in such a way that we can claim plausible deniability."
"Open Source" was wrongly added to the title by the poster. It's not used on the site to describe the engine.
Leading to page that says that Defond is not actually open source.
You're not allowed to fork and then profit from the engine itself, or the editor. That's a really important distinction, and you're right that it should be highlighted.
But it seems very reasonable to me. Any real game dev won't care about that. Basically, you can't resell the engine, but you can do anything you want with the games created by it.
They make the license terms very clear. Their license page highlights the differences to the text of the Apache 2.0 license. The only change is that you can't sell the engine itself. https://defold.com/license/
"intentionally deceptive" "there's a big fat nav item at the top of the site"
The Defold guys have released multiple components on Github with the MIT license. The fact that a navigation item is named "Open Source" does not say that all or most of the software from this company is Open Source. For example, the fact that the Apple developer site has a navigation item named "Open Source" similarly doesn't mean that all or most of Apple's software is Open Source.
"Everything about this screams"
You're attributing unverifiable negative intentions to the Defold developers.
This, the last HN thread about this, and other similar negative feedback create an incentive to avoid the term "Open Source" in order to steer clear of potential negative publicity for innocent misunderstandings and different opinions.
But they also have an incentive to keep the words "open source" in a sufficiently prominent position on their website to ensure that search engines list their page in the results for the search term "open source game engine", since it's a relevant result for almost all people who search for that term.
I'm attributing motives to them based on their own admission—that they were misrepresenting their project. There's nothing unverifiable about it. They posted on HN and tweeted about it—their own words. It's not reaching on my part. (Why are you, like other commenters here, so attached to the plausible deniability angle? It's not available anymore. It's gone.)
> they also have an incentive to keep the words "open source" in a sufficiently prominent position on their website to ensure that search engines list their page in the results for the search term "open source game engine"
Uh...? Giving an accounting of the incentives isn't exculpatory.
Thieves have an incentive to take things that aren't theirs. Liars have an incentive to tell people things that aren't true. Cheaters have an incentive to have sex with someone who isn't their partner. We already know _why_ they want to do it. That wasn't ever in dispute.
> This, the last HN thread about this, and other similar negative feedback create an incentive to avoid the term "Open Source"
This is as baffling of a remark as the earlier one.
By "avoid the term" you mean "avoid misrepresenting the license under which they're really making the source code available".
Prosecuting murder is a form of negative feedback that discourages people from carrying out murder. This is known. It's not an unfortunate consequence. It's rather the whole point.
The main item on the landing page says "free to use" and "source available", while that "big fat nav item", that doesn't show up on mobile without clicking on the navigation, clearly states:
> Defold is a source available game engine with a developer-friendly license derived from the popular Apache 2.0 License.
And under "Open source":
> A large selection of official and community developed open source extensions are available through the Asset Portal.
I think this is clear enough, and doesn't seem like they're abusing the open source terminology. Whether you agree or not with their license is another topic, but their copy seems clear to me (an OSS enthusiast and first-time visitor on their site).
That said, the title of this HN post is misleading, and definitely needs to be updated to reflect this.
(Feel free to address literally any of the pre-emptive points I made in my post, rather than responding as if I didn't already make them.)
