Version 1.2.97 of the Defold game engine was just released. Defold is a Lua powered, mobile focused 2D game engine that is free for developers to use. I have done a comprehensive tutorial series if you want to get up to speed.
This release has the usual collection of fixes and improvements, from the release notes:
Defold 1.2.97
- DEF-1129 – Added: Android Immersive mode option
- DEF-2382 – Added: App/package resource bundling
- DEF-2069 – Added: Added engine version to dev apps
- DEF-2376 – Fixed: Support for nested hash()
- DEF-2374 – Fixed: Auto completion for label module in editor
- DEF-2128 – Fixed: Music interrupted on computed gain 0
- DEF-2383 – Fixed: Collection time step was not affecting spine and model components
- DEF-2459 – Fixed: Editor 1 failed to load texc library on Windows
- DEF-2408 – Fixed: Documentation bug on window.set_listener()
- DEF-2464 – Fixed: Models not correctly destroying bone GOs
Perhaps the biggest new feature of Defold 1.2.97 is the inclusion of Live Update. Essentially Live Updates enables you to flag game content to be retrieved later, enabling much smaller download size. From the much more detailed post on Live Update:
LiveUpdate enables the developer to exclude all resources that belongs to a specific collectionproxy. When the resources within a collectionproxy is excluded they will not be bundled with the game, but instead exported as separate files for each resource. The actual collectionproxy will still be included, which allows a script to post messages such as “load” and “enable” to that collectionproxy. This will allow a developer to bundle only the first few episodes, levels, dungeons or monsters with the game that is published, and then download additional content as the player progress through the game, which will allow for a very small, and fixed, initial download size.
Very much a cool feature, but I wonder how well it plays with Apple AppStore regulations.