Hello,
Followed the recent topic about the changement about Corona, I am asking myself it will be possible to build an app an published it with the future corona offline tool ?
They say that plugins needed during building process will become local on our computers.
So if I have the lastest public release 2018.3326 installed on windows, I can create an app independandly of corona server ? Should it be possible for me to continue winning money with IAP on my games ?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Yvan.
“So if I have the lastest public release 2018.3326 installed on windows, I can create an app independandly of corona server ? Should it be possible for me to continue winning money with IAP on my games ?”
That build is ancient and you can’t publish to google play with it. You should use the latest daily build.
Other than that, based on what Rob said, the build processes will be made to work completely offline. In other words, you won’t need Corona’s servers in the future for building.
I don’t want to hijack the forum topic but why did we need our builds to pass through the Corona server in the first place if it could have been done offline?
Ok so with that latest dayly build, I am guarantee that I can continue to work on my current project, and then deploy it on google play to win money.
I invest lots of times working on one app, I have to know if I can continue in that direction, or if I switch learning an other language to making game/app.
Thanks you.
Yvan.
Probably because it was once a paid product and so a kind of DRM - also in addition it’s simpler to maintain a central build system for multiple targets than to make sure everyone can handle them on their own system, especially given Corona also has a lot of casual devs so, simpler is better.
Micheal is correct. Building locally will switch the process of getting everything just right from corona’s servers to your local workstation. Android builds locally now and has been building locally for a few months but corona was still pulling down the correct plugins from their servers.
I don’t think the build on the server had anything to do with the license check. They could have always had a license check and build locally.
Hi @JoePringles, it’s pretty simple. In the beginning you had to pay an annual fee to use Corona. There were plans at different prices. We had restrictions like you could use no more than 2 computers. To enforce that Corona was only available to paid users, the server builds were required. The servers also did things like a lot of the Xcode work needed to actually build a working Apple or Android app. Remember Corona has been around since 2008 and we’ve gone through a lot of business models.
Today with Corona being free, except for various optional plugins, the need to enforce licenses isn’t there. The developer tools have evolved to a point we can actually build everything locally now. But this is where I get to introduce a lovely software technology term: “Technical Debt” or “Tech debt”. This is the cost associated with moving away from old ways of doing things and not clearing it up. You have to spend engineering time (a cost) to remove old features. It’s just been too expensive to decouple our use of build servers.
A little more context, as we moved towards being a free-to-use platform several years ago was around the time we started adding desktop builds and then eventually HTML 5 builds. Since we didn’t need to do more than authenticate you and check plugin licenses, all which could be done with simple APIs, we didn’t need the server build baggage. Desktop and HTML5 builds have always been offline. But Android and iOS was just too expensive from a tech debt perspective to do.
When Google forced 64-bit builds on us and we basically had to rebuild the Android build system from scratch, that tech debt was going to be part of that change anyway. Today, other than some API calls Android builds are also offline. That leaves iOS and eve before yesterday’s announcement, it was our plans to go ahead and address that and get iOS on the same build system as all the other platforms. This will let us get rid of our expensive infrastructure need to support iOS builds.
TL;DR It’s just too expensive from an engineering perspective to fix it previously.
I hope this helps.
Rob