Developer App in Corona SDK

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi there,

I’m currently working on a mobile game with Corona SDK. In the past few years when I was into game making, I always searched for the “best” engine. There were always a lot of technical issues, which took away my motivation: I was fixing issues instead of creating games. To me Corona SDK is the most straightforward 2D engine.

But there are other lua based engines out there, and also HTML5 engines, that have a great feature Corona SDK misses right now: fast testing on devices without rebuilding the app. (Unless I don’t know about it, then it’s my mistake.)

So basically what I did was creating a local web server with Apache, and writing a little app in Corona, that can download all the source files and assets for my game. After downloading everything to the documents folder, it loads the sources and assets from there instead of the resources directory. This is a much faster way to test on a device.

I’m sure there are others who use this thing, and it’s certainly not my idea. My question is: why this isn’t an “official” feature of Corona? There could also be a downloadable app in the main app stores, in which you can give a URL, and with a click, you can test your new idea on a device, without building anything. This is even better if you have an iphone or ipad for example, but you don’t have a mac yet to build the app on, but maybe one of your teammates has one to build the published version.

So what do you think about this?

#2

Actually we have Corona Viewer. The current version uses Dropbox and because of quirks of the build process, you have to build Corona Viewer for  your device with your app’s build.settings (to pick up all the plugins and such) but if you edit the source when you save it the Corona Viewer will update the app live on the device.

Our engineers are working some various improvements to this. It’s an important tool.

https://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/06/26/coronaviewer-instant-on-device-previews/

https://github.com/coronalabs/CoronaViewer

Rob

#3

Thanks Rob!

So it’s my mistake, I didn’t find it in the plugins list. Is it mentioned somewhere in the documentation or developer’s guide too?

I understand the limitations, I thought about those too, but maybe a basic downloadable version could be a little help in trying it out without building it first.

To me using a free web server on my machine is a bit more appealing than using Dropbox, but this isn’t relevant. For most, Dropbox would be an easier solution.

I’m trying to do a project selection in my app. So far it seems to be fine, although I have to use a prefix variable for all my resource paths adding in the project name. The app downloads every project in a separate folder, and it only adds the current project to the package.path.

May I ask what kind of improvements are planned?

Zsolt

#4

It’s in the plugin list under the Utilities category:  https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/index.html

Unfortunately I don’t have a list of what’s being worked on.

Rob

#5

Actually we have Corona Viewer. The current version uses Dropbox and because of quirks of the build process, you have to build Corona Viewer for  your device with your app’s build.settings (to pick up all the plugins and such) but if you edit the source when you save it the Corona Viewer will update the app live on the device.

Our engineers are working some various improvements to this. It’s an important tool.

https://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/06/26/coronaviewer-instant-on-device-previews/

https://github.com/coronalabs/CoronaViewer

Rob

#6

Thanks Rob!

So it’s my mistake, I didn’t find it in the plugins list. Is it mentioned somewhere in the documentation or developer’s guide too?

I understand the limitations, I thought about those too, but maybe a basic downloadable version could be a little help in trying it out without building it first.

To me using a free web server on my machine is a bit more appealing than using Dropbox, but this isn’t relevant. For most, Dropbox would be an easier solution.

I’m trying to do a project selection in my app. So far it seems to be fine, although I have to use a prefix variable for all my resource paths adding in the project name. The app downloads every project in a separate folder, and it only adds the current project to the package.path.

May I ask what kind of improvements are planned?

Zsolt

#7

It’s in the plugin list under the Utilities category:  https://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/index.html

Unfortunately I don’t have a list of what’s being worked on.

Rob