From The Blog: Corona Labs annual update

Getting Started Announcements
#61

I think the best outcome would be if some Corona developers or someone skilled in Corona can take it on, maybe even keep the current server-based build system, but charge a subscription of some sort for developers that are making a living from Corona right now. I think those are the developers who have a bit more resource, and more stake as well…

As for alternatives, we, like others, have taken a look. We feel that Unity 3D is super heavy for 2D gaming and MUCH more time consuming to work with. We haven’t used Game Maker Studio, but (not to pour water on some other plaftorm), some of the the donwload numbers that @fireabbit mentioned are (while big for steam), rather modest for mobile F2P games. 

Also, moving to any other platform means a complete rebuild and retooling, when we really need to be working on new games/features. So, just not very viable for us. We prefer to figure out a way to make Corona stable & usable for as long as possible. 

#62

The problem I see is I assume, like me, you are all paying for splash screen and at least one ad network.  So if they cannot continue on at least $300 per active dev I do not see this as a viable solution moving forward.

Sure, removing the server costs may help but I doubt 100 devs spending $300 a year will keep the platform afloat.  After all that’s only $30k a year and hardly enough to cover vlad continuing full time. 

#63

This is a valid point. I believe some of us who are willing to continue to pay are doing so to maintain existing apps as long they are profitable enough. However, creating brand new apps is too much of a risk.

#64

@Rob appears to be the most visible(?) Corona person here, but I want to say thanks to Rob, the rest of Corona Labs, and all the rest of the dedicated volunteers for making the Corona tool suite, the documentation, and the forums, so top-notch. I know there are alternatives to Corona out there, but it’s going to be tough finding one that can measure up.

I saw this happen to GarageGames and the Torque Game Engine many years ago. I hope that Corona the technology remains more viable than Torque.

#65

I’ve also wondered what was going on behind the scenes, even though this isn’t the news we wanted at least we have some clarity.

I’m only a casual hobbist game dev (but have 10 years professional web development experience and have numberous business apps (non-corona) in play/appstore) - i’m currently working on a big gaming project using Corona in my own time so I won’t be going anywhere (for time being at least) and I’ll support Corona where I can and would help contribute via patreon for ongoing updates.

Moving to serverless builds is a good thing - I use ionic and cordova for building/compiling apps via command line anyway - which works fine - the majority of plugins are thirdparty/community based which are regularly updated by various authors who usually update their plugins to keep inline with framework updates… I can’t see why Corona can’t be any different.

  • the only issue for Corona is keeping up-to-date with the latest appstore/playstore changes… and 100% needs someone to take control of the source code and help push things forward, this will ensure its future.

But like I said - i’m not ready to abandon Corona yet and I’m happy to ride the wave of uncertainty for now - Corona seems to have a lot of fans, I dont think it’s going to disappear just yet, just undergoing some radical changes!

#66

Wow, been here for over 10 years and am stumped on what to say. Have pretty much built a successful business on coronalabs and am forever grateful to the product! Thank you @rob and @vlads for your amazing and hard work. All good things come to an end… we have been using unity more and more lately but would love to continue also using corona and hopefully it can sustain a while longer open source. Count me in on financial support via patreon or whatever means we have going forward.

#67

This really sucks. I initially thought it would be a good thing because I’ve been wanting offline builds for so long, but I don’t know if the community is big enough to support Corona. Maybe if Corona went opensource years ago it would have been saved, but I’m really skeptical that we can save it at THIS point.

This is a really big hit to me personally. I moved to Corona from Adobe’s Flash back in highschool…so I’m getting _Flash_backs (haha, get it?). I also have 3 new projects being built in Corona. I’ve going to opensource a bunch of my private helper code to help incentive the community to continue. I’ll try to get those up on my GitHub this weekend.

Some of my private code includes:

 - an automatic screenshot generator. Supports automatically taking screenshots of your app in all resolutions and languages

 - material design-like buttons which hook into the widgets library

 - embeddable scrollviews

I’m also thinking that maybe http://phaser.io/ could be an alternative? Has anyone used it? I love having an explicitly 2d engine. Unity and Unreal engine (I’ve built games in Unity and help my brothers with Unreal) are so battery-intensive for 2d on mobile. 

Edit: Thanks to @rob and @vlads for helping with Corona so much! Your hard work allowed me to publish my games for phones in highschool and college :slight_smile: The money I made from those actually entirely supported my study abroad experience, so you can say Corona really affected my life.

#68

I’ve used phaser for prototyping a game for a football club, it’s great for browser based html5 games and very easy to pickup - but it’s not really geared for deployment to app stores, but you probably use Cordova to compile it

#69

Hmm. I’ve been working on a build-system of sorts for Corona would builds to HTML5, Android and iOS with a single CLI command. CLI is in Lua. It’s also autodeploying Lua game servers with Nodejs and Luvit and setting up websockets automatically. Anyways, I’m trying to make the decision if I should pivot now to something like phaser or continue with Corona. Hard decision, because I’m really scared in 2 or 3 years time Corona will get dropped.

If a CLI tool like this interests the community, I can try to turn it into an open source effort.

I really think the only way Corona would survive into the far future is if the community sticks together.

#70

Corona isn’t going away. Corona Labs is. They are separate. Engineering efforts are going to continue on it. You’re going to get serverless builds. You won’t have to pay for the splash screen. Hopefully with the new OSS license, other developers who were turned off via the GPLv3 license will want to work on the engine.  

As the TL;DR said, you shouldn’t see much of a change. You will get your builds from a different site. Not much more will change. 

Rob

#71

We plan to have CoronaCards be part of the package going forward. Given the most uncertainty that’s being expressed is around Apple’s unclear plans to deprecate OpenGL. So let’s say, hypothetically Apple does. Vlad and community developer’s can’t make it happen (and I have full faith that we will address this OpenGL thing post Corona Labs). CoronaCards is still dependent on the Corona rendering engine. If the Corona Simulator isn’t going to work, CoronaCards isn’t going to work. Unity is no help here. And if you want to use Unity as a building tool and CoronaCards so that you don’t have to convert your app, then you’re going to have to subject yourself to a less than pleasant experience with Unity. My understanding of Unity building for Android/iOS you still have to use Android Studio/Xcode to make the builds any way, so why not just use Corona Native in that case?

#72

In the very short-term, perhaps, but you can’t rely on ‘hopefully’ if you’re running a business. One major change from apple or google after May and we’re relying on someone with the time, talent and generosity to do the work necessary to ensure builds continue to work. 

#73

Thanks for all your great work here Rob, including during this transition. I guess people are worried that without any financial support, the engineering work will stop. Any further clarity you could give about this (or a statement from engineering lead) would be appreciated.

We’re about to enter beta testing for our latest Corona game. At this point we’re going to continue with Corona and see what happens. If we need to port to a different engine in the future, that will happen in the future. No need to jump ship right now. Relax, take a deep breath peeps. It’s going to be OK.

Open source Corona could potentially have some good benefits going forward too. I would join Patreon support if it helped continue core engineering. 

#74

When we are talking about open source game engines, the first ones that come to my mind are LÖVE, Cocos2d-x and Godot.

From what I’ve understood, Godot is practically thriving and it is being generously funded. Cocos2d-x is most likely doing well too and I think they just added metal support to it in December (wink, wink).I haven’t heard of LÖVE in a while, but I imagine it isn’t doing too poorly either.

Corona can absolutely survive and even thrive in the open source environment.

#75

Which is why I’m wondering if I’m missing something and the idea of charging a subscription to Corona users is something that’s been explored in more depth? I would imagine anyone running a business based on publishing Corona-based apps would gladly pay a subscription to support continued development of the product? We certainly would.

Patreon is basically a subscription service. Once that’s setup we will see how may people sign up and at what level they are willing to support ongoing development. One nice benefit for this is Patreon will charge monthly, so coming up with larger annual sums will help. I’ve always wanted us to have a monthly plan. 

The major concern for us is not so much new features being added (Corona already does more than enough for our current 2d development needs over the next few years) but support for any changes Apple and Google make meaning we could be in a position where we simply can’t submit updates a year or two down the line with newer versions of Android or iOS.

We are able to keep up with the changes now. 64-bit Android was quite a bit of a challenge. Swapping out the graphics engine will potentially be a sizable task, but the reason Apple is going away from OpenGL is that it’s a dead project. It’s not seen updates in quite a few years. Vulkan is the modern day OpenGL so it may not be that difficult because I think it’s based on OpenGL But the point is we have been able to keep up and there is no reason we won’t be able to, in particular if we get enough sponsorships. 

Rob

#76

Yup. We have three projects in development with only one of those nearing completion (looking for a publisher at the moment), and I don’t even intend to port those other two to a different engine while it’d be easier to do now.

If it does happen to be a necessity at some point, so be it, but Corona is just too perfect for us to drop it while there’re all the chances that it’ll at least survive, and likely will get even better. :) 

#77

Hi @ammar71. 

The open source repo can have multiple administrators/developers who can approve pull requests. Vlad will certainly be one of those. I don’t know how many and who else will have the privileges to approve pull requests. We can’t answer that yet.

Rob

#78

Let me throw out some thoughts that I’ve learned over the years. Apple’s even numbered version of iOS tend to have the biggest visual changes. The odd numbered versions don’t change a lot visually, but tend to have more clean up under the hood.

Apple also doesn’t like making breaking changes. They have to of course and they work hard to maintain backwards compatibility when possible. Programmers have always had a pretty stable platform build upon and new versions generally don’t bring major changes. Fix a few things and move on. Now this OpenGL is in a class of it’s own and I have no insight in to how they are going to handle that.

But we want Corona to be viable, so it’s a change that will have to happen.

Rob

#79

This seems to be an easy migration path if Apple does depreciate openGL - https://moltengl.com/moltengl/

#80

Link