You are not mistaken (if I remember correctly, full disclosure; I used to be an engine dev on Defold).
Not sure why Hokusai tried to point to that forum thread in this case, which shouldn't have anything to do at all with his comment? I guess, we will never know. :)
I don't have any numbers for you, but I would assume it's on par with other engines compiled with emscripten. We do however focus a lot on performance overall in the engine, and keeping the binary size low, so I would believe we st least are in the front comparatively. :)
There is currently a push for HTML5 related tasks in the planning, so it will only get better.
My answer will of course be biased, since I work on Defold.
But if you are going for a 2D game, I think Defold is a really good choice. We support Android, iOS, desktop (Win, OSX and Linux) and HTML5. We try to solve all the icky platform specific stuff for you. And to start coding you only need to download the editor, there is no development environment to set up.
Are you doing fancy 3D stuff, then Unity will probably be better, currently. :)
Nothing is sent to any King servers, unless you actually want to use our analytics tools, which is an opt-in solution anyway. :)
The only reason why projects are hosted on our servers is due to the legacy of the engine, originally planned as a subscription service, long before being acquired by King. This is something that really wasn't a problem up until now, which is why it simply has stayed that way.
We want it to be easy for users to just create a project and start coding, not having to spend time on setting up development environment and code hosting. However, of course we see this is something people want to be able do as well. We will add the ability to more easily configure where projects are hosted (or even use local projects (already added to the new editor)).
Ooops, missed this question, sorry for the late reply. :)
The asset pipeline is not as customizable as one could wish for in it's current form, but something that will change with the upcoming new editor. In honesty, we haven't had a lot of requests in this regard in-house yet, but if this is something that is highly requested by indie users we will surely look into this.
(Hold tight, going into a bit of a tangent below.)
We put a lot of effort into performance, keeping the binaries small and having fast development iteration.
One very nifty thing is that the build/pipeline can be run as command line command, without even opening the editor, which enables you to setup your own build command in Sublime Text or on a build bot for example... (I have something like this at home where I can code in Sublime, hit Ctrl+B and it will build with the same code as the editor and automatically launch the game, all from inside my favorite code editor. Just imagine how sweet this will be when the pipeline/engine is a bit more extendable. :))
Yet another cool thing of course is being able to hot reloading resources while the game is running, also tying into the fast development iterations.
Hope this at least answers some of your questions. :)
I can understand coming from that perspective, that including analytics could be interpreted as unnecessary for people not actually needing it. One of the reason it was added is since a lot of game devs want to actually see how their game is doing when released. But this is something they don't want to spend precious development time on. That money/time is better spent on doing cool games instead. :)
There is no hidden agenda here, we really just want to enable people to track installs/DAU etc across platforms without writing a row of boring platform specific analytics code.
We are working on a new editor, a total rebuild (dropping Eclipse), which will also have a much better GUI/look. It will also enable extendability of the editor and pipeline.
It will have a unified look across all platforms though, but I would believe it's a bit more "OS X like" compared to the old Eclipse stuff.
In short, it will look a bit more modern than the current one. :)
Thanks! Yes, this is something I agree with fully, and one of the things I feel works great with Sublime.
edit:
And while I might not have been it clear enough in my post, I'm not delusional thinking I might be sitting on a gold mine here. But I think it would be nice for people to show their appreciation if they also benefit from the app as well, but for it to work there needs to be as little friction as possible. And I don't know if/what such service exist, and if it is worth the hassle.
To be fair, the first impression of a job seeking related site should come of as professional, minor design quirks (even stuff like font errors from minor CSS mishaps) can be a thumb in the eye. Valid points and the authors seem to appreciate the feedback.
And there are quite a few non-design related comments as well.
Not sure why Hokusai tried to point to that forum thread in this case, which shouldn't have anything to do at all with his comment? I guess, we will never know. :)