From The Blog: Keep Calm and Corona (the game engine, no relation) On!

Getting Started Announcements
#21

@Prathap

Three excellent paragraphs, thank you!  As for the rebranding, the one thing I’m uncertain of is how difficult (time consuming) it will be to change all the names in the tutorials and 8 years for other things that are helpful to the Corona community.

I think it is a perfect time to change names (maybe essential as well) and I’m willing to help out with that move but I get the feeling that a lot of people (not you #Prathap) think that rebranding is just slapping on a new logo and calling it a day when it is, in fact, a much bigger job that will require many of us to contribute significantly if it is to be a successfully transition.  Some of us will need to step up and make new video tutorials and help update the long chain of other things that will need to be aligned with the new identity. 

#22

@sporkfin I completely agree with you. If they decide to re-brand after all, those of us who are pro re-branding need to come together, delegate tasks amongst ourselves and assist them in this transition (needless to say, I’m up for that). Rob and Vlad will not be able to carry out all the re-branding tasks on their own. Regarding the video tutorials, I’ve never used them and I don’t know how relevant they are to the current state of Corona. Maybe somebody who’s more informed in this regard can chip in here.

#23

@Prathap  I think we would use a whole new series of coordinated videos that feature our engine - whatever its name may be.  I’d be interested in doing a few and I know another developer who is planning on making some.  I guess for me, I’m holding off until we are open source and have decided on the naming issue.  It would suck to make a bunch of videos and then have them be irrelevant because of a name change.

Looking back, I see that a lot of Corona tutorial videos were deprecated by the release of graphics 2.0 which was a big improvement but then suddenly commands like this made no sense

[lua]

object:setFillColor(255, 176, 38)

[/lua]

Coming from a graphics background the 0-255 range made perfect sense to me but the more I programmed the more I appreciated the 0-1 range.

#24

0-255 is a very common way to view computer colors. 0-255 to Hex RGB (think CSS) is still a pretty reasonable conversion) so I wondered about the reasoning behind it. And it comes down to this. 0-255 is very 8-bit thinking. It’s also not a very “GPU” way of thinking either. Many computer graphics software at the programming language uses percentages. (that’s what 0-1 is after all).

Here’s the current Swift UIKit UIColor help page: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor. It’s 0…1

I’ve always had a problem with 0…255 anyway. 0/255 = 0.  255/255 = 1 but 127/255 is 0.4980392157. You can’t actually achieve middle gray. 

#25

hello what  about admob plugin? this plugin will still be paid?

#26

All first party plugins will be free. Supported with same crowdfunding model.

#27

thx .   in build Version 2020.3579 (2020.3.27)  I can use them already or only after May 1?

#28

I believe you will need a new build of Corona that makes other paid Corona-made plugins free. Currently we have only disabled license checks for the Splash Screen Control and Self-hosted plugins.

Self-hosted plugins will allow you to include third-party plugins now from their own hosting facilities.

Rob

#29

can’t using admob plugin 

#30

Hi-- didn’t intend on posting off-topic on this thread but I had raised this issue on the Mac forums some days back and there wasn’t a response (understandable as this is a busy period of transition for the Corona staff) but it is a major issue so I’m posting here:

The latest Corona builds seem to have some issues with creating Mac builds. The builds get done without errors but cannot be run. The most recent version which is still able to create runnable mac builds seems to be 3569. It would be helpful if someone could check this out-- it’s probably something minor. 

Other users have reported this problem too on the Mac forums

thanks

#31

I experience same issue …  build for MacOS builds instantly…   try to run the app and crashes.  

I believe 3569 was the last time I could build and successfully run the MacOS version

#32

Could you please create a separate thread about macOS issues, I’ll answer there, do not hijack other threads, sine it seems to be a separate issue.

#33

Sorry, raymondcheng, AdMob is a paid plugin for now. Later we will put all our plugins on GitHub for free. It will not be free purchase from the store. Later builds (closer to may) would be able to automatically download the plugin and use it from the github. It is not yet done.

#34

Awesome!

#35

Thanks for the update Rob!  Great to hear how things are progressing.

I’m curious if you and Vlad will be creating tiers or goals for the fundraising?  We’d love to know how much we need to raise to fund Vlad full-time, and how much to also get you paid to continue your work as well.

#36

Both support links are active. Patreon seems to let you set how much you want to contribute with a suggested $5 / month. The GitHub link has 9 different suggested contribution plans.

Rob

#37

I guess I was thinking more like:  Vlad needs $XXX/month to continue full-time development.  Rob needs $XXX/month to do part-time community management.

Godot has funding goals to continue development.  Will Corona do that at some point?  We want you to succeed, but again we have no idea what goal we’re evening aiming for.

#38

The problem is if I say “Staff member A” needs $XXX,XXX a year, then I have effectively told you Staff member A’s salary, which is very private and personal information and I’m not going to divulge that information.

Another reason to not say how much Vlad needs is that it sets an artificial celling. It would be nice if those willing to contribute would contribute more than he needs. We would love to hire, at least on a contract basis, additional development resources so we can work on things like Switch support, adding new features, and more. And this isn’t even factoring me into the picture.

I will throw out one idea that you can consider when trying to figure out what your contribution should be. If you only bought a splash screen control plugin, you were only contributing $8.33/month. If you purchased a premium ad plugin you contributed $16.67 a month. If you did both, it would be $25 / month. And that wasn’t enough to keep Corona Labs going. 

Rob
 

#39

I get that, I’m not wanting to pry into peoples finances.  But it’s hard to have any idea how close we are when there is no information disclosed about fundraising or goals.  You say what was coming in wasn’t enough to keep Corona Labs going, which again creates uncertainty that we won’t be able to raise enough.

I’m not sure what the solution is but I’m looking at how others have done it.

Here is Godots pateron: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

They have rewards for each level.  Giving things like your name in the credits, voting on roadmaps, company logos in places, etc.  And also if scroll down to Goals they show certain levels they can hire more people, bring on some folks part-time/full-time, etc.  This creates a desire to hit those levels and grow the engine.

Glideros has a neat tool to estimate your donation: http://giderosmobile.com/donate

I know we’re early and Vlad is focusing on development, but we also need to think about funding and a recommended $5/mo donation on Patreon isn’t going to cut it as you said.

Anyone else have ideas on how we can create funding goals and keep transparency with the community, but still keep salaries semi-private?

#40

it wasn’t enough because a lot didn’t bother to remove the splash screen.
Imagine ten thousand active Corona developers, of whom only 100 pay $99 for removing the splash screen.

I would have liked to make Corona a commercial product for $ 99 a year.

10,000 users pay $1 million a year.
I think it was enough to keep Our Coorna.

Sorry, I’m bad at speaking English :slight_smile: :slight_smile: