Defold is often thought of as a 2D only game engine, but it is in fact a full 3D engine. If you found Defold thanks to recent Unity news, then we’ll try to provide a clear picture of what you can expect when working with 3D content in Defold. 🧵
#unity3d #indiegamedev #gamedev
Defold is a 3D engine from the ground up. It always has been. At the moment we are not building high-level features, but work on the foundation for them and provide our users with the ability to build their own features and tooling.
- Simple model component and import from glTF
- Dynamic mesh component with ability to modify at runtime
- Basic 3D materials and shaders (GLES)
- 3D physics using Bullet3D
- Cubemaps
to be continued.... 🧵
- Lua scriptable render pipeline
- Perspective camera
- Texture compression using BasisU (@_binomial)
- Scene editor
This is the boring part and it is all covered in our manuals:
@_binomial @jhonnygoransson Illumination by @astrochili
This extension contains ready-to-use forward shading lighting for 3D games made with Defold. Just set the provided material to your mesh and place light sources on the scene.
@_binomial @jhonnygoransson @astrochili Defold Kinematic Walker by @astrochili
This is a tweakable kinematic character controller suitable for 3D games when you don’t want to use a dynamic body and prefer to have more control over the movement.
@_binomial @jhonnygoransson @astrochili Defold Camera Operator by @astrochili
This is a tweakable camera movement controller suitable for 3D games. It can help you smoothly control your character’s camera or make cinematic motion paths using checkpoints.
@_binomial @jhonnygoransson @astrochili @tb_leveleditor Scene3D by @aglitchman
Scene3D is a collection of assets to help you to develop 3D games with Defold. Use included prefabs to quickly prototype structures, levels, and to test game mechanics. Try out ideas quickly!
@_binomial @jhonnygoransson @astrochili @tb_leveleditor @aglitchman @d954mas This is a taste of some of the ready made solutions available if you want to create a 3D game in Defold.
Now go and download Defold!
PS If you want more there’s an even longer list in this thread:
Some thoughts on the open source discussions yesterday: There was no ill-intent on our part when said that Defold is open source. The source code is available on GitHub for anyone to play around with and hopefully contribute to. This is what we meant, nothing else. 1/9
Our license, derived from Apache 2.0, has an additional clause to prevent someone from selling Defold (engine+editor). We want our community to always be able to use the best possible version of Defold for free with no upfront fees, no royalties and no licensing costs. 2/9
As a game developer you can of course commercialise any game you make with Defold, you can sell your extensions, plugins and tools and you can make any change you want to the engine and editor and you don't have to contribute back if you don't want to. 3/9