How native are the "native" games

GDevelop general
1

I had this in my mind for some time, I didn’t feel like asking what could be a stupid question but I noticed that a lot of other forum users are asking this kind of questions and are getting answered without judgement, so I decided that it should be okay. :slight_smile:

I don’t think that I understand how native are the “native” exports; when GDevelop was new to me, I thought that they were just electron apps with the same JS code as the web exports and that the c++ code was removed, because this is what someone somewhere else said.

Then I learned that the native games don’t always behave the exact same way as the web games (usually better), and I noticed on GitHub that most of the code is in c++.
We all know that electron apps can have native code under-the-hood, like balenaEtcher.

So now, I believe that both the GDJS games and the GDcpp games use PixiJS for graphics and that’s it. Am I right? Please tell me how native are the ‘native’ games, I want to know. Thanks in advance

2

First of all, the native platform (GDCpp) is no more, it has been removed in gd5 and gd4 is not supported anymore.

The platform defines the exporter: each platform is for a specific language. The Javascript platform make JavaScript games. To run those on PC you need electron, which runs JavaScript in a browser environment. The CPP is ignored as it is part of the GDCpp platform, and only that platform exports it. Similarly, GDCpp doesn’t export any JS code. GDCpp doesn’t export for electron, as it doesn’t has to. Being in cpp, it can directly use renderers without having to pass through a browser environment and an interpreter.

2 Likes
4

Thanks Arthur for this clear and precise informations about the subject.

There is no stupid questions. When you need responses, you ask! It must always be so simple like that.

2 Likes