Defold: cross-platform game engine (opens in new tab)

At least they mention that it is source-available, but they still mix "open source" into the mix on their site.

It is a really nice and fair source-available license and there should be more of this, but a license like theirs also restricts what kind of software you can make in a rather harsh way.

Since you can't commercialise game engine products and they are defined in a broad way. You could land in legal issues. Game engine products are defined in the license as:

“Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content.

IANAL, but map editors, modding tools and many other kind of tools that can be used for developing video games could be in violation of the license.

Since meaning of "commercialise" isn't being defined or narrowed in the license small creators using Patreon or the like while asking donations could be classified as a violation too.

People don't have such hindsight. And we can't ask them to have it, as it is impossible to predict the future with such accuracy.

Without RMS swinging hard one way and without Amazon swinging hard the other way, we would not have this license.

It is because all of these shenanigans that we now kind of have a license that solves these issues, and surely when the landscape changes again, a new license scheme will be needed.

> Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit

Not a choice he had. You cannot relicense GPL code line that. He would have had to write a new system from scratch instead of forking an existing one.

Really what it means is there is one entity entitled to monetize the project, so it will probably just die if their monetization ideas or execution are lacking or their enthusiasm wanes. GitHub is full of dead projects like this because monetizing software is hard, building important software is hard, and doing both is even harder. Open source should be funded, but this isn't an efficient way to do it.

Mullenweg, approximate net worth $400 million, should have thought long and hard 20 years ago if "a rising tide lifts all boats" allows for others to have boats, or just his. There should be a $billions ecosystem around WP even if Mullenweg doesn't get that money.

Consider the space we're in. For game development you're going to have a lot of developers with a lot of different ideas about how to make a game, all utilizing the same engine. If the engine doesn't come with a feature I need, I'll probably have to code it myself, but seeing as the whole purpose of me making this feature is for my game, then it makes sense that I should be able to keep my game's feature private/proprietary without the need to push that feature back to engine which might not even want my feature to begin with. This is why GPL is not a good choice for game engines.

>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). > Why is that a good thing?

Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do proprietary things is attractive to big players.

>> and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.

> If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to rely on "some assurances"

Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no guarantee).

>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL).

> Why is that a good thing?

Instead of writing an internal project from scratch, you modify an existing project and tightly couple it with your internal process. What's wrong with that?

It specifically says you are not allowed to commercialize the engine or a derivative, so that sounds like something that is not intended to be allowed, though I feel like it might take a lawyer to decide whether or not that is technically allowed by the license.

You'd first have to make proprietary changes, which you are not allowed to release, and so there's nobody to sell those services to.

I don't know what they think, but I think it is not necessary. Let's draw a comparison to Blender here. Blender is GPL, and there is a long history of questionable projects that relabel Blender and try to sell it.

There is the requirement to make the source code available (GPL), as far as I am informed, you can sort of get around this, by delivering the source code with the download, but then "don't advertise" it, as in hide it as much as possible without getting in legal trouble.

(My information may be a bit outdated here) Afaik, the Blender Foundation doesn't even bother to shut these projects down (they do get frequently informed about it, when people discover it).

And this even given the fact, that they would be easy to shut down. The reason for this, is used media in advertising. If you want to sell your 3D package, you need to show some impressive artwork which was created with said project.

Problem is, the images/animations these projects show off on their websites are a) not created with said Blender reskin, but usually in Blender itself and b) they usually don't have permission from the artists.

So even having this quite comfortable handle, BF usually don't care. Which tells a lot about the impact of such copycats.

My takeaway from all this is, the situation would pan out pretty similar for Defold, and they should just dare it and monitor the landscape.

Because they don't want somebody else to sell their game engine? It's pretty clear, isn't it?

> Seems fair, but sadly not OSS.

Which of their license changes makes you feel sad and why? Were you planning to sell their editor?

> I wonder where a game with built-in editor ranks

The website-summarized version of the license says:

> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine

It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for other people to then sell a modified version of their entire game.

It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available, and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode project to players just so the players can make a custom map.

The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-new map-editing UI inside Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot, etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format that the game can parse.

I remember this was initially developed at king games (candycrush saga authors) before they got acquired. Probably that's the reason for the weird licensing model

There are a lot of reasons to go "source available", such as preventing hyperscalers or enterprises from lifting your product.

Here's some commentary I made in another thread on this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728095

The Defold Foundation immediately stopped calling Defold open-source when it was pointed out that the license was in conflict with the OSI definition.

https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...

Given the addictive nature of Candy Crush it’s a little bit like a drug lord building a hospital.

Candy Crush is less deadly than drugs, but a game engine is less useful than a hospital

AFAIK, King spun Defold back out as a foundation.

i wish people would stop mentioning W4 Games as a porting option. their lowest revenue tier costs $2000 a year. most indie games sell a few hundred copies.

That third party is owned by Godot's leadership and management. Your Godot contributions go towards their pockets.

Yeah I really like Godot and you're right, the third parties are working hard on that front. It's been a trial for them though.

I guess the roots with King have made things easier for Defold?

If you just want static typing, you can write Typescript and compile to Lua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

C# support is still experimental and under development, but it is at least ready for testing for those that are curious. Note that it is C# with Native AOT so it's compilation and linking involved, not "scripting and hotreload".

Not entirely true, but sure, there are fewer bells and whistles in Defold compares to Unity, Unreal and Godot when it comes to 3D.

Here's a recently released 3D game made with Defold: https://forum.defold.com/t/cashchubbies-island/78183/22

No, data is stored in protobuf text format (and at runtime compiled to binary protobuf files ofc).

No, Defold is developed by six full time and two part time developers. All developers are fairly compensated. Most of the work done on the engine is "general development" funded by corporate partners, studios and publishers. There is quite a bit of overlap between the needs of specific partners and the general development roadmap.

No. Wrong. Console branches are available for free if you are approved by the vendor.

That seems kind of unfair.

There are things that aren't great about lua, and I'm not going to pretend they're not. buuuut...

- It's really perfectly ok if you use competently.

- There are large complex systems and games built using it (eg. factorio) that show that scaling it is both pragmatic and possible.

- It has a big active community.

When you compare it some other scripting solutions (boo, unityscript) that were just incompetently done, or mystifyingly deciding that writing your own language is the solution (jai, gdscript), I feel you have to admit it's a reasonably pragmatic choice.

There aren't a lot of other languages that embed as a scripting layer the same way that lua does, with the same performance.

Many candidates are either very hard to work with embedded (python) or simply lack any feasible way to possible embed them as a runtime scripting layer (go, zig, c, etc).

Maybe there's a future for WASM scripting layers in games, but for now, I certainly haven't seen it done well.

I can confidently say: Lua, the language, is not a minefield. Not to me. Not to you. Not to anyone.

Some projects expose a lua scripting API that is a minefield; ...but those two things are not the same thing, and by all accounts (I haven't used it personally, but just idly reading the forums) the defold scripting layer seems fine to most people.

Thank you, I started Godot recently and I'll take a look at Defold as this is the exact thing I am doing - and Godot seems a little unstable with the APIs. Every tutorial I find is for Godot 3, and Godot 4 seems quite changed.

Thanks for this!

I am torn about backing off to focusing on first getting the UX (which is really "the thing") right, and just emitting a MIDI MPE stream. That obviously has some other benefits but there were things I was keen on having low-level control over... but I can get over that maybe...

Ambivalent also about target—really, the iPad is the ideal and canonical target, in terms of what it can and the UX it affords... but I have this possibly unfounded sense that the amount a coding copilot can assist me is somewhat limited inside the Apple ecosystem... :/

EDIT: oh and is your engine something I can look at (or license or...)? :)

I am rooting for Godot here because it has a human readable scene file format.

So when you have an AI agent modifying your project you can actually understand what it did, vs. the unity yaml based format that is mostly unreadable.

The JetBrains Rider IDE also works pretty well with Unity.

Wonder if their Junie tool will support C# soon, the current features for other languages are already cool: https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/

(I got access to it cause I have the all products pack, pretty good so far)

The problem with Unity is not their marketshare of game developers (which they have in spades), but rather their market share of ads which they completely missed out on.

Game developers don't bring nearly as much revenue as ad serving, which is a sad commentary on the reality of software development and the state of of the games industry.