Dec 17th Newsletter thoughts

Solar2D Daily Builds and Public Releases
#21

Could someone explain to me why Corona should need a GUI? Come on, it’s game PROGRAMMING, not game “drag’n dropping”. If you want to create games or apps, make your hands dirty and learn programming. At least you will KNOW what you are doing then.

LUA is so simple that there is no excuse not to do so. We are not talking of C++ or Objective C here. If Corona or LUA are too difficult to use for someone, he has clearly chosen the wrong market. Professionalism always requires skills. This is why you want to get paid for.

As a customer, I’d feel pranked if I purchase an app from someone who even don’t know anything about programming. If you don’t provide more skills than your customers have, there is no need for them to pay for your products, right?

This may sound controversial, but I am in business as a game programmer for more than ten years now. It’s like visiting the art college to deliver professional art to the people and someone asks you to color by numbers.
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#22

But would be nice to have a full suite of native UI components (not game objects) that could be placed in a GUI builder as it would save so much time when building non game applications.

Plus support for native UI components in the simulator is a MUST!

What I would REALLY not like to see if another charge for an additional modules/components/etc! [import]uid: 9371 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14657[/import]

#23

I agree. Full suite of native UI components would make perfect sense with a GUI builder. I’m really hoping we can have this. Even if it’s iPhone UI components on Android - Google won’t reject it!

If native UI in the simulator can’t be achieved, I would be happy to settle for debug on device. [import]uid: 11393 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14658[/import]

#24

Could someone explain to me why Corona should need a GUI? Come on, it’s game PROGRAMMING, not game “drag’n dropping”.

Not all of us are using Corona for game development. It started out as a game SDK, but now is functional enough for corporate and utility apps.

You seem to think that a GUI as part of the IDE would eliminate the need for code. Not true for both iOS and WP7 SDKs which both require code (even MS Expression Blend which is a very extensive GUI builder for WP7).

If you want to create games or apps, make your hands dirty and learn programming. At least you will KNOW what you are doing then.
We know how to code thanks very much. And as a result of knowing how to code we’ve built our own libraries to help us to rapidly deploy prototypes in Corona. We’d develop even faster if layout was handled by a GUI.

as a customer, I’d feel pranked if I purchase an app from someone who even don’t know anything about programming.
I doubt the typical customer cares how an app was built - only what it does.

Alternatively I’d feel ripped off as a client if I had a developer charge me excessive hours because he was doing things “the hard way” instead of the “smart” way.

If you don’t provide more skills than your customers have, there is no need for them to pay for your products, right?
Wrong; they can pay us for the time better spent on application functionality instead of wasting time on trivial items such as layout and screen management. Having my designers take care of the donkey work and free my developers to focus on other things.

This may sound controversial…
Controversial - no. Arrogant - yes.

… am in business as a game programmer for more than ten years now
Good for you.

It’s like visiting the art college to deliver professional art to the people and someone asks you to color by numbers.
If you’re so obsessed with doing things the hard way, why not drop Corona and use Objective C? Or better yet go really hardcore/oldschool and code with assembly. It’s only a couple of peeks and pokes right?

At the end of the day, I support anything that will open up Corona SDK to more developers with varying degrees of skill. More developers means more subscriptions. More subscriptions means more money. More money means more resources. More resources means a better Corona. A better Corona makes everyone happy.

Shutting out potential developers because they’re not “hardcore” enough doesn’t really work as a business case.

[EDIT: Grammar] [import]uid: 11393 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14656[/import]

#25

@bedhouin: I think you misunderstood my post. The point is: if almost NO skills are required to create a product, the overall quality of the products will plummet significantly.

If tons of low-quality products flood a market, it will harm ALL of us.

Same happened to the Flash games scene years ago. Since there were tons of crap quality games out there, prices dropped rapidly, making it impossible for serious developers to earn money creating online games. For standard customers and companies, the term “online game” soon became a synonyme for “trashy ware”.

My intention is not to “go the hard way” but to keep up good, professional quality on this market. Do you want the iPhone market become a synonyme for quickly cobbled games?

It already got worse in the last few months. Take a look at the quality of games out there in the App Store. 9 out of 10 games available are carelessly cobbled quick shots. This happens when almost no skills are required.

And nobody needs to go the hard way if he KNOW what he’s doing and how to do it best. Convenience does not replace experience.

BTW, A GUI builder would be useful, of course, this is not what I am talking about.
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#26

The point is: if almost NO skills are required to create a product, the overall quality of the products will plummet significantly.

A GUI is not a silver bullet. It will allow someone inexperienced to create something incredibly basic and that’s it. To go beyond basic they will need to learn to code. A GUI in the hands of someone experienced will free them up to spend more time coding and building a better product.

Do you want the iPhone market become a synonyme for quickly cobbled games?

The last time I checked it already was - without Ansca’s help.

I’m more concerned about the quality of product I put out and less concerned about the quality of others. Overall industry quality is not my problem, nor is it Ansca’s.

On the flipside there are already plenty of garbage apps written in ObjC and in Corona. Perhaps if less experienced coders were given access to better and easier tools the quality of their products would increase.

To draw an analogy with web development 10+ years ago:

Dreamweaver let people build rubbish websites. It also let a team of designers and coders work together and build great sites quickly. The designers built the front end, the developers had more time to build the backend.

Would I like to go back to my designers building web prototypes in photoshop and have my coders build it up entirely in HTML, and have to manage the backend at the same time? No I wouldn’t.

I would like to see Corona evolve into a more team centric tool which will allow designers to participate in the process, which in my view will ultimately create a more polished product.

The simple fact is that my coders are not designers, and my designers are not coders. I want man hours spent effectively, so that we can build faster and better. [import]uid: 11393 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14663[/import]

#27

“I would like to see Corona evolve into a more team centric tool which will allow designers to participate in the process, which in my view will ultimately create a more polished product.”

I agree on that, but if so, I really hope Corona would evolve into a professional direction (as Unity did, for example) instead of being just a “simple to use toy”. Or in other words, I hope it won’t attract too many of those “wanna-be game developers” that believe creating a game is a matter of a few mouse clicks only. [import]uid: 9644 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14682[/import]

#28

Here’s my two cents

GUI for placement only ok although it’s not that hard doing it by hand
Don’t want another gs or gm [import]uid: 7911 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14696[/import]

#29

you know how much i enjoy reading your wants and rants and needs !

this is great

and the entire team is reading so… :wink:

c [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14697[/import]

#30

GUI for placement only ok although it’s not that hard doing it by hand

One device profile is not hard - it’s just a time waster.

HARD is creating pixel perfect layouts purely in code for: iphone, ipad, nexus, slate for both horizontal and vertical profiles without scaling. There are just way too many numbers involved and too much recompiling.

A designer could knock up different presentation profiles for each device with the same underlying code in less than an hour and be confident that when they handed it to the programmer everything would be in the correct position. WYSIWYG changes everything.

It would be great if we could spend more time writing functional code instead of trying to guess the coordinates of a pixel on screen - and then recompiling 5 times to narrow it down for EVERY object that needs to be moved. iOS SDK has a builder thats optional to use. If you want to do it all in code, you still can - same with WP7 SL SDK.

A GUI builder will really take Corona to the next level and into the current decade. [import]uid: 11393 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14721[/import]

#31

Carlos, will support for Android 2.3 be added soon, as the 2.3 API is already available. It sounds like the many complaints we have with regard the performance in Android might well be solved by the 2.3 release. Here’s a snippet from the 2.3 what’s new…


Enhancements for gaming

Performance

Android 2.3 includes a variety of improvements across the system that make common operations faster and more efficient for all applications. Of particular interest to game developers are:

* Concurrent garbage collector — The Dalivik VM introduces a new, concurrent garbage collector that minimizes application pauses, helping to ensure smoother animation and increased responsiveness in games and similar applications.

* Faster event distribution — The plaform now handles touch and keyboard events faster and more efficiently, minimizing CPU utilization during event distribution. The changes improve responsiveness for all applications, but especially benefit games that use touch events in combination with 3D graphics or other CPU-intensive operations.

* Updated video drivers — The platform uses updated third-party video drivers that improve the efficiency of OpenGL ES operations, for faster overall 3D graphics performance.
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#32

the newest android sdk is in d house ! and we are well aware of the new offerings :slight_smile:
c [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14751[/import]

#33

It largely doesn’t matter now as I’ve abandoned the idea of building for Android. I’m sticking to iOS [import]uid: 9371 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 14755[/import]

#34

While a GUI builder might be nice, I’m thinking that Carlos’ comment about “they [the big announcements] will open up mobile development to an even larger market” means two new mobile platforms that will be supported by Corona. My guess would be Symbian (Nokia) and RIM (Blackberry). They already have a demo teaser video of it running on Symbian, and RIM has a lot of market share too. Looking at this market-share chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.png) these two would be the obvious next two platforms to support. [import]uid: 11021 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15325[/import]

#35

Although am not suppose to comment at all, I just can’t help it,

Symbian is dead. DOA. Kaput. Ceased to live. Stopped breathing. Can’t flap its wings anymore. The video was our POC way way way back when we were starting out Ansca in mid 2008, when Symbian was the emperor with no clothes.

C.

:ugh… how do I really feel about Symbian?

[the hyaenas from the lion king]
Symbian ! oohhh say it again say it again… Symbian…ughghghghgh [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15353[/import]

#36

Ha ha! Ed used to crack me up!

When can you tell us what it is Carlos? My brainbox is burning with anticipation. My guess is a Dreamweaver style GUI and maybe a Windows version of the SDK.

Happy New Year everyone. [import]uid: 6762 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15358[/import]

#37

Okay with Carlos’ declairation that Symbian is dead, it obviously isn’t that. It’s hard to get good mobile platform sales data on the web (I see a lot of conflicting reports). I have no personal experience with Symbian, nor do I have any friends that use it, so I would say it’s a dying platform for sure. I have friends that use Blackberry, so I see this this one as relevent right now, but this is also a dying market (as is Palm). Not sure where Windows Mobile is going, but it doesn’t have much traction out there from what I see. If the announcement is for two new mobile platforms, I’d say it would be Blackberry and Windows Mobile, but I’m not so sure about that is the announcement now.

Blackberry and Windows Mobile would open it up to a larger overall mobile market, however Carlos mentioned “an even larger market”. Maybe I’m getting caught up in semantics, but Blackberry and Windows Mobile wouldn’t be bigger than iOS and Android combined. So maybe he’s taking about something a bit outside of the mobile market, such as desktop (Mac / Windows) or the web. I would think it’s kind of hard to make the same code base work for both a mobile and a desktop app (there’s differences in the UI and how they are used, etc), so I’m not sure it’s that. However going for the web market might make more sense. Typical flash games are very similar to mobile games, in terms of content and user expectations.

I’m revising my guess to be an option to build your code to flash as one announcement, and the other as Corona on Windows (meaning a Mac wouldn’t be required anymore). Not totally sure about that last one as I don’t know how you’d do all the code signing stuff that Apple makes you do (which is all done on your Mac). [import]uid: 11021 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15370[/import]

#38

It’s hard to get good mobile platform sales data on the web (I see a lot of conflicting reports)

I sometimes wonder about this too.
@Carlos:

I’m glad that you are not going to focus on Symbian, but just for the sake of healthy debate…

Using South East Asia as an example; sales of Symbian “phones” are still strong and easily outsell Android and iOS. Sales of high end Symbian “smartphones” are weak. I imagine this would be the same in China, India, Africa, ME, Latin America, and parts of Europe (developing economies). The majority of these markets (98% in some cases) are prepaid, and the users don’t go for postpaid/contract plans.

The lower end of the market is dominated by Nokia. The problem is that these handsets are not sold with bundled data plans, and the people that buy them have no intention of using data or making app purchases - they just want a cheap phone to make calls and send texts. A low end Nokia would be $US25 for a Java handset and $US100 for a Symbian handset. By comparison, an iPhone 3GS wouldn’t be less than $US500.

So if you were a phone vendor, Nokia is still a relevant player, and you could definitely shift their units. From an app developers perspective which is what Ansca (and we) would care about - it looks dead.

Using flaky data: number of iPhones sold worldwide to date is 50+ million. In terms of worldwide phone users - thats barely a blip on the radar.

Let’s assume (and the telcos we work with are assuming some of this):

  1. Mobile data costs continue to plummet (economies of scale)
  2. Prepaid plans start receiving free data volumes with every top up (already happening as data prices are factored in)
  3. Prepaid plans receive unlimited trickle data beyond their cap (already happening)
  4. Mobile data provisioning on handset becomes automatic via SIM (already happening)
  5. Nokia introduces a coherent marketplace for apps (they’re trying)
  6. Nokia allows operators to control localised app marketplace
  7. Nokia and Operators create incentive programs for in-country developers to create localised content (already happening)
  8. Nokia allows app/subscription charging by deducting operator prepaid credit (on-net) instead of charging to credit card or paypal (off-net)
  9. Nokia standardises their device profile to two resolutions and interface (S60 footprint touchscreen or keyboard)
  10. Base cost of above handset is reduced to mass market affordability

Suddenly this irrelevant base of Symbian users has access to affordable mobile data services, a marketplace for apps, localised apps, and prepaid charging for purchases.

With regards to points 6,7,8 Nokia doesn’t just make phones, they make network equipment. They’re hard wired into many mobile networks around the world with SMSCs, MMSCs, LBSCs, USSDCs, mobile gateways, charging gateways, profiling systems, HLRs etc etc. They have network level access that Apple, Google, and Microsoft do not.

Due to the iphone, operators are losing control of the customer experience and no longer have a monopoly on charging and billing. They want to get this back.

My point to this oversized post…

My opinion; I would still keep my eye on Symbian. Smartphones in their current form are not for everyone. There is still a market for users that want a low cost phone with some data/app functionality. Operators want to regain some control over user experience and service charging. Nokia has an installed user/network base to leverage on and capture this market.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t use a Symbian device if you gave it to me for free, and Nokia dropped the ball big time and are struggling to catch up. But I still think they have an opportunity to make a comeback.

They didn’t obtain the worlds largest share of handsets by making high end devices, they obtained it by flooding the market with functional low value handsets - and that’s something Apple will NEVER do. We just need an environment where the masses have access to a low cost app capable phone with capped cost data and on-net charging.

Mobile data access will be booming in the next decade for developing countries as the cost of rolling out phyiscal infrastructure is inhibitive and in some cases not possible - Cambodia for example is going all wireless because of the proliferation of land mines. And in many cases individuals can’t afford a computer but they can afford a phone.

[EDIT: access to “free” mobile data services should have been “affordable”] [import]uid: 11393 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15399[/import]

#39

@bedhouin and @Greg Squire have you seen our Segundo teaser?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mh4uK_iaME

We have POC of Corona Symbian… But we left it at that…

Carlos

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#40

Carlos,

Yes, I had seen the Symbian Teaser some time back. That’s why I made that prediction, but you clairified that Symbian is dead in your mind (I would tend to agree).

I just realized there are two other mobile markets that I hadn’t thought of because they aren’t smartphones, and that is the DSi and PSP. Both now offer downloadable games from third parties (DSiware & PSN), though it’s a bit harder to get on these platforms than iOS and Android. It would be cool if Corona could support these in the future as well. Perhaps that’s the big announcement? :wink:

I also just noticed that Angry Birds is available on on about every platform out there now. (iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows, Mac, DSi, PSP, and soon Windows Mobile). Those guys have been busy, as I’m sure they’ve had to write a new program for each platform. That’s one thing I like about Corona, is it’s cross platform nature; write once then compile and deploy to many. [import]uid: 11021 topic_id: 4557 reply_id: 15788[/import]