Coronium Core - Application server/plugin for Corona developers

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Coronium Core

The ultimate cloud sidekick for your Corona apps and games.

An all-in-one Lua application server and Corona plugin built specifically for Corona developers.

Extend your applications into the cloud with Mongo and MySQL databases, secure file transfers and storage, dynamic public facing web pages, and more; all customizable using a ridiculously simple Lua based api.

Use the Coronium Core client-side plugin api for most tasks without ever writing a line of code on the server. When you need to take it to the next level, create custom server-side apis with Lua for complex data driven applications.

With the Coronium Core all-in-one server, you own and control your data, with an easy to use custom built solution for Corona developers.

Coronium Core is now available in the Corona Marketplace. Lock in your pricing now and receive new modules as they are released. User management (with email registration), Analytics, and a web based Dashboard will be released soon, with more on the way. Price will increase with new functionality. Plugin purchase includes unlimited applications and server installs, and frontline plugin and server installation support.

For more information check out the documentation and video tutorials.

Post questions, discussions, screencast requests, and module suggestions in the Coronium forum.

Thank you for supporting Coronium solutions.  :slight_smile:

-dev

#2

This is a fine piece of software with equally fine documentation: https://develephant.github.io/coronium-core-docs/

If you ever wondered, “What software should I use to connect my players and handle my data for my multi-player game?”  I think the answer is clear:   Coronium-Core

#3

@develephant

This is great news Chris, I just got my subscription - thanks!

#4

Funnily I just 2 days ago started to dive into a multiplayer idea and just yesterday played around a bit with Autolan - might have a look into what the various Coronium products offer - but given the comments etc. I’ve read so far, seems to be really decent. Also scripting by Lua sounds like a perfect option (I’ve never really used PHP)

Are the other 2 plugins (SkyTable/Chatter) just running on a kind of specialized/pre scripted version of Coronium Core?

#5

** UPDATED ** See @develephant’s update below: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/70231-coronium-core-application-serverplugin-for-corona-developers/#entry366520

@Michael,

I believe that these three products (Core, ChatterBox, SkyBox) are complimentary products.  I am pretty sure you can run them all together, although I’ll let @develephant confirm that.

The above turned out to be wrong.  You cannot run Core with the other two plugins.  Still, quite cool and looking forward to Versus product coming later this year.

I think the ChatterBox and Coronium would be a nice combo for certain uses. You could probably implement your own version of Chatterbox with Coronium-Core, but having it ready made is quicker and more reliable.

#6

Looks great. Thanks

#7

Hm will see what delephant might say - right now I don’t even know what I’ll need but I’d happily use/buy all 3 plugins/products if I can use them somehow. In general I think development products are so ridiculously cheap these days, it’s not even funny :slight_smile:

I used to work in gamedev when AAA engines did cost half a million dollars and, in the end, it was still worth the money for serious developers requiring the features. Nowadays you get some assets/plugins doing some really worthy work for the price of a one or two beers, it could be called free IMO.

What I’m aiming to support at the moment is a local multiplayer game where each user uses his/her smartphone but the primary game is hosted on another devices (usually a tablet) and one puzzle game where I simply want to offer additional levels designed by me and/or other users. Especially for the local multiplayer game I’ll need kind of fast networking as user reaction time matters. But at least not like a 60fps fully synchronized action game and more like a … press the button first in a PvP game. I’ll see what I come up with, but even if I only use some Coronium products for ingame messages it will be worth so much more than their tiny pricetags.

#8

*MODIFIED SLIGHTLY FROM ORIGINAL POST*

@Michael,

Some will say…

If you simply want a peer to peer game for folks in the same ‘room’, just use basic (UDP or TCP) networking over local WiFi.  

You can roll-your-own or use AutoLan.  However, I warn you.  While this gets rid of the need for a server AND ensures the connection is just local, there a lot of tiny technical issues and programming ickyness to deal with.

But, far-simpler…

is to use Chatterbox with a back-end server and the folks in the room simply enter a same named room, then viola the rest is easy.  Sure, the data is going to the server and back, but it is sooooo much simpler to do it this way, to me it is worth it.

You can easily make one of the peers the game controller in this scenario.

The big benefits I see here are:

  • crazy simpler to develop
  • supports local game play
  • supports remote game play (don’t have to be in same room any more)
  • You needed WiFi at a minimum for local play, so I see no networking requirements difference really.
  • The flight time is higher than LAN, but only nominally so, and certainly within the realm of 60ms i.e. every other frame at 30 FPS, so for puzzle games, quiz games, etc this works just fine.
#9

Hi,

First off, thank you all for the support and nice comments, really makes it worth the effort.

Just to quickly clarify the differences on the products:

TL;DR - Coronium Core should not be installed with other products.

Coronium Core is an all-in-one server heavily geared towards data-driven applications. It’s very well suited for business style applications, but there are plenty of uses in the game space as well. With the addition of Pages, it offers some unique interfacing to your applications via the web. Core is not a real-time server, but with Mongo you could build turn-based games quite easily that will perform very well due to the speed of the server. Core should be kept as a stand-alone install and can not be mixed with the other products.

Coronium SkyTable shares some minimal concepts under the hood with Core, but it is not built on top of it. It’s a much more streamlined install and code base, and less evasive server wise as Core is. Core and SkyTable can not run on the same server together. Core provides the same functionality through its Data module, in a more robust fashion.

Coronium ChatterBox uses an entirely different engine from Core and SkyTable, and is a real-time TCP messaging server. Best suited for real-time chat, it can also be used as a message transport for gaming, though the API is more general in nature. While SkyTable and ChatterBox can run on the same server, Core and ChatterBox should not be installed together.

In regards to real-time gaming, Coronium Versus , which is in its testing and documentation phase, builds on top of ChatterBox to provide a gaming specific API which can be implemented server-side using Lua. Because you are able to build code on the server-side, it is considered an “authoritative” game server, which has many great benefits. I’m hoping that Versus will see a general release near the end of October.

I hope this helps clear up some questions. In essence SkyTable and ChatterBox are the lighter equivalents to Core and Versus.

-dev

#10

@Delephant

Thanks for clearing things up somehow. In a later posting in another thread you mentioned that versus, right now, is aimed at turn based games, so I guess it would not fit the realtime requirements?

@Roaminggamer

Right now I use Autolan as my focus are local users within the same room and I ideally need as fast as possible reaction times while I can get away with extremely low bandwidth - f.i. watch objects appear on display and when a special one appears, be the first who touches/grabs it. I’ll try Coronium (ChatterBox) later on when I have some more of the gamemodes implemented and if it still feels good enough while playing I’ll happily add an option to play with someout further away :slight_smile:

#11

I remember reading that too. @Delephant said “At this time, Versus is turn-based and only supports two player games.”

Link to thread.

#12

Hi,

To clarify (I hope), ChatterBox and Versus operate in real-time. As in the players/clients are connected in a “room” together for the entirety of the session. in the case of Versus, the turn-based aspect is more specific to the server-side API. But, you could certainly roll over the “turns” as quickly as the server could handle. This is specific to Versus because of its authoritative nature.

ChatterBox does not have an authoritative element, so messages are immediately broadcast to the room in which they are sent. This operation is as quick as any TCP messaging would be based on the given resources. This is in essence a non-turn-based system, which would lead me to believe that you could possibly create a game like @elifares is talking about, the only issue is that in that type of game there are number of other factors to be considered that don’t have much to the with actual messaging, this link here has a good overview of what those issues can be. In most cases an authoritative system is the way to go.

I focus on the “turn-based” word when describing Versus because that is the only type of development I have done with it. I can’t say for certain that it would be capable of a more straight forward real-time system, only because I have never tested it in that way. Often people point to the UPD protocol as better for that, but this has been debated. A handful of AAA games use TCP, like WoW and others. But you have to utilize the concepts in that link I mentioned above. In general an action type game should probably use UDP, but neither Versus nor ChatterBox are built on that protocol.

Could these engines handle both turn-based and non-turn-based gameplay? It’s possible. But I don’t specifically mention that, because I don’t have any testing to back that up. I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting it as such, without being certain through my own experience.

Hope that helps.

-dev

#13

Thanks for the additional information - clears things up a lot.

#14

This is a fine piece of software with equally fine documentation: https://develephant.github.io/coronium-core-docs/

If you ever wondered, “What software should I use to connect my players and handle my data for my multi-player game?”  I think the answer is clear:   Coronium-Core

#15

@develephant

This is great news Chris, I just got my subscription - thanks!

#16

Funnily I just 2 days ago started to dive into a multiplayer idea and just yesterday played around a bit with Autolan - might have a look into what the various Coronium products offer - but given the comments etc. I’ve read so far, seems to be really decent. Also scripting by Lua sounds like a perfect option (I’ve never really used PHP)

Are the other 2 plugins (SkyTable/Chatter) just running on a kind of specialized/pre scripted version of Coronium Core?

#17

** UPDATED ** See @develephant’s update below: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/70231-coronium-core-application-serverplugin-for-corona-developers/#entry366520

@Michael,

I believe that these three products (Core, ChatterBox, SkyBox) are complimentary products.  I am pretty sure you can run them all together, although I’ll let @develephant confirm that.

The above turned out to be wrong.  You cannot run Core with the other two plugins.  Still, quite cool and looking forward to Versus product coming later this year.

I think the ChatterBox and Coronium would be a nice combo for certain uses. You could probably implement your own version of Chatterbox with Coronium-Core, but having it ready made is quicker and more reliable.

#18

Looks great. Thanks

#19

Hm will see what delephant might say - right now I don’t even know what I’ll need but I’d happily use/buy all 3 plugins/products if I can use them somehow. In general I think development products are so ridiculously cheap these days, it’s not even funny :slight_smile:

I used to work in gamedev when AAA engines did cost half a million dollars and, in the end, it was still worth the money for serious developers requiring the features. Nowadays you get some assets/plugins doing some really worthy work for the price of a one or two beers, it could be called free IMO.

What I’m aiming to support at the moment is a local multiplayer game where each user uses his/her smartphone but the primary game is hosted on another devices (usually a tablet) and one puzzle game where I simply want to offer additional levels designed by me and/or other users. Especially for the local multiplayer game I’ll need kind of fast networking as user reaction time matters. But at least not like a 60fps fully synchronized action game and more like a … press the button first in a PvP game. I’ll see what I come up with, but even if I only use some Coronium products for ingame messages it will be worth so much more than their tiny pricetags.

#20

*MODIFIED SLIGHTLY FROM ORIGINAL POST*

@Michael,

Some will say…

If you simply want a peer to peer game for folks in the same ‘room’, just use basic (UDP or TCP) networking over local WiFi.  

You can roll-your-own or use AutoLan.  However, I warn you.  While this gets rid of the need for a server AND ensures the connection is just local, there a lot of tiny technical issues and programming ickyness to deal with.

But, far-simpler…

is to use Chatterbox with a back-end server and the folks in the room simply enter a same named room, then viola the rest is easy.  Sure, the data is going to the server and back, but it is sooooo much simpler to do it this way, to me it is worth it.

You can easily make one of the peers the game controller in this scenario.

The big benefits I see here are:

  • crazy simpler to develop
  • supports local game play
  • supports remote game play (don’t have to be in same room any more)
  • You needed WiFi at a minimum for local play, so I see no networking requirements difference really.
  • The flight time is higher than LAN, but only nominally so, and certainly within the realm of 60ms i.e. every other frame at 30 FPS, so for puzzle games, quiz games, etc this works just fine.