Defold Official Runtime

supersaiyansubtlety

I've been messing around with Defold and I love it so far. However it only has a 3rd party spine runtime, and it's missing some important features like animation tracks, easily combining skins, support for linked meshes, and directly manipulating mesh vertices.
Is there any possibility of official spine support for Defold?
Perhaps some cooperation between Spine devs and the Defold devs could save a lot of time, as there's already a spine lua runtime and defold already has their own runtime.
As it is, I'm going to try out Corona, as it's the only officially supported lua game engine I see. It's business model and general approach doesn't appeal to me the same way Defold's do though.

supersaiyansubtlety

Nate

I'm not sure how much of Defold is exposed and whether it would allow a runtime to work efficiently, but we can take a look. It's too bad the Defold guys didn't integrate our runtimes.

There is LOVE.

supersaiyansubtlety

Thanks!
I forgot about LOVE, but I want as much GUI as possible, so I'll try Corona first.

Nate

FWIW, Spine is written in libgdx and badlogic and I are the authors of libgdx. Needless to say, libgdx is pretty great. :nerd: It has a UI framework which is what lets us be so productive when working on Spine:
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Scene2d
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Scene2d.ui
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Table
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Skin

supersaiyansubtlety

Thanks, I've checked it out and I have a few questions.
Since it's in java, is speed a concern? Java's not known for being fast, lua is.
When I said I want as much UI as possible, I was actually talking about a UI for myself, as the programmer. Like in Defold, you can drag around objects with your mouse to set starting position in a scene, things like that. Is there anything like that for libgdx and scene2d?
Thanks again, I'll at least see what a quick tutorial game is like using scene2d.

Nate

supersaiyansubtlety schrieb
Since it's in java, is speed a concern? Java's not known for being fast, lua is.

Java is easily 20x faster than Lua without JIT for anything that you do and could be much faster in some cases. With JIT, Lua can perform better but still won't be as fast as Java. Note that JIT is not allowed on iOS. Java is "slow" compared to C/C++, and even then Java can be faster (mostly due to how allocations are done).

supersaiyansubtlety schrieb
When I said I want as much UI as possible, I was actually talking about a UI for myself, as the programmer.

Ah, libgdx can't help you there. Maybe look at Unity, Unreal Engine, or Godot. Note we don't have a Godot runtime yet, but it is in the works.

FWIW, I wouldn't personally use Lua, as it is dynamically typed (productivity tanks because many bugs cannot be found at compile time, and a large codebase is a nightmare because refactoring tools are poor) and the syntax is a bit wacky (1-based array and string indexing is not good).

supersaiyansubtlety

Ah, I see, I did some more research on lua and I see that lua is only fast for how high level it is.
However I also researched java and don't like that it doesn't have an easy way to make console games. I'd like to be able to release games on all platforms.
I was hoping to be able to use a somewhat high-level language and avoid using C++, but it's looking more and more like that's the best option.
Or maybe I'll give unity another try since C# is apparently similar to java.

Is there any high-level language I've overlooked that can be used to make games for PC, console, and mobile?

Nate

Unity is likely your best bet for being able to target the most platforms and to have a UI for development. It's true C# is similar to Java. Java is a bit simpler, it can be verbose but is easy to read.

supersaiyansubtlety

Thanks for your help and advice