Just deployed my first converted game, but all I see on the device is “CoronaCards TRIAL” ?
Do we need the licence file? Searched the forum and docs but still not sure.
As I don’t see my game screen there is for sure something wrong…
And another question:
As the build.settings file is not use, where do we include the plugins?
In the output window I got the error:
Runtime error
module ‘ads’ not found:
no field package.preload[‘ads’]
I commented all the ad stuff and the game started!
Question: on the right side of the phone I see a bunch of small numbers (rotated 90 degrees).
Is this some debug info? I deployed the game as “Release ARM”.
How to remove this?
Starting with daily build #2600, CoronaCards for WP8 no longer requires a license file. It is completely free to use. So, you just need to download a newer version from our daily builds web page. You can upgrade your Visual Studio project to use the newest Corona version by following the instructions here…
http://docs.coronalabs.com/daily/coronacards/wp8/upgrade.html
Corona for WP8 does not currently support plugins. You’ll have to integrate an ad library into your project on the C# side yourself. @spacewolf was nice enough to write up a tutorial on how to integrate Google’s ad library into a WP8 project in the link below. You can also use Microsoft’s ad library, which is much easier to integrate, but might not pay as well as Google’s ad network.
I also recommend that you read our porting guide here…
http://docs.coronalabs.com/daily/coronacards/wp8/portapp.html
And regarding the numbers that you see on the right side of your app, that is debug information displayed by Microsoft Visual Studio when running you app via the debugger. If you stop the Visual Studio debugger and run your app normally, that information does not get displayed. So, it’s nothing to worry about. 
Thank you for the help.
Now to the text rendering issue.
Is this issue only if the text is constantly refreshed (e.g. a time with seconds displayed) or does it applies to static text also?
What about text in the scroll-view?
Our leaderboard screen which uses scroll-view has very bad scroll performance.
So the general question is: For best performance, should we replace all text with bitmap fonts?
Any text generated by display.newText will perform slowly on WP8. We recommend using bitmap fonts. The scrollView should be plenty fast enough once you use bitmap fonts.
Rob
The creation of the text bitmap via Microsoft’s Silverlight APIs is the cause of the performance issue. So, anytime you create a text object or update an existing text object’s text, Corona is forced to create a new bitmap to render text to and then push that new text bitmap to the GPU as a texture. It works this way on all platforms, and if you think about it, generating a new text bitmap/texture everytime you update text is an a generally expensive thing to do on all platforms as well. It just happens to be most expensive on WP8.
So, to recap, the following will cause a performance issue:
-
Creating a text object.
-
Updating a text object’s text.
-
Resuming your app while it is displaying text objects. (We’re forced to re-render all text since WP8 flushes all textures in the GPU when your app gets suspended. This happens on Android too.)
But that said, text objects have their advantages too. Since their text is rendered by the operating system, you’re leveraging Microsoft’s hard work in making text render correctly for all languages/locales. Particularly much more complex text such as Arabic/Asian where it’ll also handle text wrapping correctly for the different languages/locales. So, I would say text objects are appropriate for text that you rarely update or for text that comes from a source that is out of your control, like Facebook, Twitter, or other Internet sources.
For text that you update frequently, like an FPS framerate counter, bitmap font would provide the best performance. And bitmap font text is only appropriate for text that is under your control, because you need to ensure that each character is within your image sheet (aka: sprite sheet).
Regarding your scroll view, if the number of rows is hard coded, then perhaps a quick solution would be to pre-load all of your text objects and re-use them as they scroll back into view. Otherwise, bitmap font is the only solution that would yield best performance.