Following the success of BubbleBall... my humble hopes for Corona!

Solar2D Daily Builds and Public Releases
#1

Following in the fortunate success of BubbleBall, Ansca finds itself in the spotlight… and with sudden media attention comes (we can all hope) more developers, a larger community, and more Corona apps in the marketplace. And so… how might Ansca respond? Without doubt, every developer “demands” something different from their software, so Ansca is in the position of trying to satisfy 99% of us, which is impossible of course. :slight_smile:

Below are a few of my own hopes. Take them with a grain of salt if you want; I know I’m just one developer among thousands.

1) Core optimizations: As I mentioned in a recent post, I hope Ansca invests more team resources in core optimizations of the engine… and maybe a bit less on cool features. Cool features are nice, but some internal speed and performance improvements would make me happier, personally, since it seems like I spend alot of time tweaking my code to almost ridiculous degrees trying to coax out a few more frames-per-second. Also, like most developers, I have to write alot of my own little helper functions to accomplish what, I believe, should be written into the core Corona API library. Take a look at Jon Beebe’s growing module of these little assistant functions – “move”, “moveTowards”, “getAngleTo”, “getDistanceTo” – and more in each version release! These are exactly the things I’d like to see bundled in the core API, because no matter how efficient we program these helper functions, there’s no way we can equal the speed of these programmed at the internal level.

2) Bug fixes! I reluctantly admit that I’m growing impatient on some of the bug fixes. I hope the upcoming “Daily Build” versions of Corona will help get some of these bugs squashed, quickly and permanently. It seems that some of them have been in “critical” stage for weeks, if not months, and this can be frustrating for all developers.

I think those are the top 2 for me. While I like new features – “bells and whistles” per se – as much as the next developer, I would prefer (going into early and mid-2011) some under-the-hood improvements to Corona. These, I believe, are beneficial to all developers, not just those who want to implement iAds or Facebook “friends” or streaming video or whatever else. The previous release with OpenAL Audio is a perfect example of what I would like more of: a core API improvement that virtually all developers can appreciate.

Keep up the great work Ansca; this isn’t meant to be a flame post, it’s just my personal hopes for the future of Corona. :slight_smile:

Brent Sorrentino
Ignis Design LLC [import]uid: 9747 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 305265[/import]

#2

FLAMING POST FLAMING POST I called it first ! I got dibs on this flaming post !

So let me get this straight? You want us to do core optimizations? Did you see the new super secret weapon we got working with us now? Eric

Bugs? we have bugs? where? We hired a exterminator, I have not seen any bugs since we moved to the new office this past Thursday…

Bugs? …

Jeez…

Carlos [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 17995[/import]

#3

@brent on a serious note:

thanks for the feedback.

c. [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 17996[/import]

#4

Funny, I have completely opposite views. While I’m all for bug fixing, I think the core is already good enough for most needs (on iOS).

What’s really lacking is more monetization features. In order to offset the cost of the subscription we need to make money with our games, so in my view the “bells and whistles” are vital to that.

Like the upcoming IAPs, which were the most requested feature for a reason. Stuff like GC, iAds, adwhilrl, etc, is critical if we want to be successful. Much more than whether or not we can fit a few more particle effects on screen IMO. This is stuff everyone can benefit from.

Poor Carlos, seems you have your work cut out for you in order to please everyone. [import]uid: 10835 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 18287[/import]

#5

Ignacio, you make some valid points. I understand that in a developer community as diverse as this, and with an equally diverse variety of projects and goals, not everybody needs to squeek an extra 3 FPS out of some physics-intensive game. Many people aren’t even using physics. Other people are pleading for iAds, while I personally don’t plan to use them (at least not in a paid app, and I don’t have any free apps in mind at this time).

So Ansca, as with all software developers, is caught in the middle and I understand that they can never satisfy everybody. They are doing a great job overall and, when I put the entire thing into perspective, I’m 95% happy with Corona and I am having fun using it. :slight_smile:

The bugs are where 5% is lost. :slight_smile: I can’t express the frustration when I spend hours of my time working on some game aspect, then I hit some major stumbling block which (when presented to the forums) is revealed to be a critical bug. For example, “Physics bodies do not scale properly when using screen scaling like ZoomEven, but this will be corrected in a future version!”. So all the effort I put forth toward this must be undone and re-programmed. Time is of the essence for any developer wishing to monetize their projects, so 6 hours down one path and 2 hours back (to undo it all) isn’t very cost-effective. :slight_smile:

So to “update” my humble hopes for Corona going forward, #1 is bug fixes. I think that’s a common wish for all developers, no matter what kind of application, no matter if it’ll be free or paid, etc.

Brent
[import]uid: 9747 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 18308[/import]

#6

Again I agree that bugfixing should be high among the priorities, because who wants to use buggy software, right? However there’s a workaround for pretty much every documented bug, while there’s no workaround for adding GameCenter. While it’s certainly frustrating to waste time looking through your code for something that ends up being a bug in Corona, it’s not as bad as not being able to add the features your customers are demanding and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it. [import]uid: 10835 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 18324[/import]

#7

Just recently got into Corona after reading a LOT about all the cross-platform options out there. Very impressed so far, I’m coming from AS3 and JS so picking up Lua has been fairly easy (although I do miss FlashDevelop terribly).

As far as I can tell from the branding* of the site, Corona is positioning itself as an ideal choice for game developers, right? …So I have to agree with the original poster here - I’d definitely prioritise on performance before adding any nice-to-haves.

By the way, I was inspired to come and say this after seeing this guy’s video:
http://pixelpaton.com/?p=3209

( * = Sorry, I have to say it: Although it probably makes a few dim-witted visitors feel more comfortable during their first 5 seconds, the whole iClone web design thing really isn’t doing you any favours… ) [import]uid: 34073 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 21666[/import]

#8

One thing I want to share, the engineers here have done an outstanding job on performance, that there are areas we can still improve on. It is just a matter of time to get those last optimizations in and there will be quite a performance increase. The last time the team improved performance was 10% increase across the board. And there is plenty of room for more that we haven’t even touched upon.

C. [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 5265 reply_id: 24820[/import]