Nostr Web Client

Snow Captain 2y ago 💬 2

I've been learning the Defold game engine (and teaching it as I go) and I have

to say that I mostly like it. Godot gets most of the "small game engine"

attention, but Defold seems to be a very worthy competitor. I really like the

built-in messaging system and it provides a TON of flexibility while presenting

a simple concept. My biggest issues with it so far are poor drag-and-drop

support for the editor, and overall the bare-bones nature of the editor in

general. The Lua code completion in the editor is really good, but Lua is a bit

of an opaque language and finding the correct API to use and teaching the

concepts has been quite difficult and time-consuming. Defold has a lot of

promise, but I feel like it presents a higher-than-usual learning barrier and

the messaging concepts can lead to some seriously tangled runtime headaches.

Again, I'm still learning Defold, but I expect to use it for some small 2D

projects in the future to compare and contrast it to UE5, Godot, and of course

my own game engine, Clockwork.

#gamedev #indiedev #defold

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Discussion

Siraaj Khandkar 2y ago

Oh! I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on Lua.

I'm now considering embedding a sandboxed, IO-less, computation-budgeted scripting language, and Lua crossed my mind, since it was motivated by embedding. But... I don't actually have any experience with it.

Snow Captain 2y ago

I'm not sure Lua fits those requirements. You can probably restrict or remove its I/O abilities, but I don't think it's designed to be computation-budgeted (if I understand what that's supposed to mean). Lua uses a byte-code virtual machine with a very clean, simple C ABI interface (and C library bindings to go with it). Indeed, I would be so bold as to equate Lua to "C script": it's small, simple, and powerful. C focuses on global/static variables, functions, and arrays. Lua focuses on global variables, functions, and tables (Lua tables are really key-value maps). Lua seems to answer the question "what if we turned C into a scripting language that could be re-executed at runtime without recompiling to machine code?" And for that purpose, Lua is great. My gripes with Lua stem from its simplicity and lack of safeguards around certain patterns, very similar to C. For embedded systems, I don't think Lua is a good idea; for games and other "non-critical" software that needs to support quick development and iteration of code and ideas, it's a very solid choice.