Very quiet on this thread, given the implications.
I draw residual income from my Corona apps now. I haven’t updated them in 18 months. For me personally, I will not develop new projects in Corona. More uncertainty than Brexit (I’m UK based)!
Threads like this used to attract a lot of attention on these forums - not so much now.
I’ll cut to it. I don’t think Corona is profitable for the owners and hasn’t been for a long time (if ever). Apathy prevails amongst many in the community.
Many of the old familiar names on these forums are long gone. Corona is an amazing SDK - yet I can’t help thinking that the end is nigh. However - I’ve thought this before and yet it still survives. I hope for the best but fear the worst. Just my humble opinion.
@hoarcebury these are great questions. I’ll be pulling together all the things the community is asking and start working on our FAQ page.
If we end up using GitHub, managing issues there would seem to make sense. There would need to be a community facing tracker.
Rob
I think the active base is tiny these days… (well compared to when I started anyway).
I think people come and go. Seems lots try indie dev but it doesn’t work out for them necessarily (or financially).
“Corona Labs will continue to support the engine and going open source means more transparency to the process.”
I would like to ask what does this mean once Corona SDK goes full open source? Ex. When the Android API level goes up, will the Corona SDK engineers make the update or it will be the responsibility of those who decide to contribute?
Can we have a stable version of Corona SDK to continue building applications for Android and Apple?
I think it’s better that they speak to us clearly from the beginning. So we can make better decisions with our projects, especially those developers who have successful applications or games with their respective clients.
Thanks in advance
DoDi
From the looks of it, they made this announcement so we can ask questions and they give better answers when they go open source. I guess Rob is pointing to that as an FAQ. It’s still unclear when the transition is going to happen though.
I am very much looking forward to this. Per richard11’s earlier question, I still mean to go the plugin route whenever I can, but there are definitely instances where I’ve run up against a wall, knew roughly how that could be addressed, but was then at the mercy of engineers already strapped for time. :) (As probably no surprise, many of these cases concern graphics.)
Questions:
Along the same lines as other questions regarding the submission process, how might we go about making proposals and hashing them out? In the case of non-trivial submission, I imagine upstream being more receptive if they don’t come as a complete surprise: smoothing away obvious incompatibilities, sussing out the repercussions of various approaches, and so on.
Even if somebody doesn’t want to dabble on the SDK, there might be other ways to contribute such as, say, submitting to or tightening up the test suite. Will this sort of thing be available?
While definitely not a frequently asked question, more of a Readme even, I would also be very interested in anything like an example of the anatomy of an implementation, e.g. “currently, the Android-specific bits are here, here, and here; a new platform must at the very least define the first two”. I suppose it could come down to just subclassing a few key types (long ago Walter said it was a straightforward process), but I’m guessing it’s a bit more tangled.
As SGS says, is there an active user base out there to support this? Finding enough people with the talent, time and desire to contribute to the sdk is going to be tough as things stand. There’s maybe a handful of forum members with the talent but they’ve got families to feed.
Are there plans to try and attract new users in greater numbers?
Nick: I consider myself sort of the new guard but I just looked up when I started using Corona at it was 12/06/2012. So about 6 years and a couple of days. I don’t see myself contributing much to the engine. As I usually do I’ll create plugins if I plan to use them and I’ll answer any question that deals with monetization or Gamesparks.
I hardly have any time now and I just can’t see myself on top of the other things I do working in C++/C to keep Corona up to date. I’ll continue to use it for as long as I can. So although this thread is of concern to me, I am trying really really hard to not add any more negativity.
I’m kind of in the same boat. Been using Corona for 6+ years and would love to use it for another 6. I do make a living off my apps and really want Corona to remain stable and relevant. I wouldn’t have time to directly contribute to Corona SDK, but I’d be more than happy to spend $$$ and contribute financially towards the people keeping Corona alive.
if i had to guess, as complete conjecture, i’d say there’s maybe a handful of mega-developers (fe, those whose annual revenues potentially exceed the total valuation of Corona Labs itself) who requested/demanded this for sustainability reasons - they might even have the staff to actually take ownership of a fork in-house if it ever became necessary. but maybe 99% of everyone else (myself included) would never even tinker with it.
I’ve used Corona for 6 years. I have 60 or so apps developed with it.
I’ve programmed computers for over 30 years (including console game development, my own advanced software renderer and a Computer Science PhD from The University of Manchester) and I work from home. In theory I am amongst those on these forums that are able to contribute to the development. However, it’s a significant undertaking and, for me, the risk/reward does not stack up.
if i had to guess, as complete conjecture, i’d say there’s maybe a handful of mega-developers (fe, those whose annual revenues potentially exceed the total valuation of Corona Labs itself) who requested/demanded this for sustainability reasons
I think Dave’s point is a good one. As they say on Dragon’s Den: “I’m out!”
Before jumping to conclusions, I guess we should wait for the final announcement. Since there are many ways to go, many different routes to follow in open source development we should see the license they are planning to use. I mean Unreal, Unity, LÖVE, Godot and many other engines are open source. They all have different approaches, still being maintained by the main developer team.
Let’s just wait and see. Also, don’t forget that this was a planned move on Corona’s end which they outlined in the roadmap at the start of this year.
Indeed, let’s not jump to conclusions. Each Corona transition has invariably led to doomsday talk, and yet we’re still here.
On the other hand, it won’t hurt if Corona started communicating better with us. I see Rob trying hard to do his best while trying not to give away anything before the announcement but since it’s been a week, I think it’s better to start sharing more about the process. The silence or “doomsday talk” as thomas6 puts it out, is really bad for the community.
There really isn’t much more to add yet. I’m going to go through the posts since we announced last week both here and on slack, pull the questions and start collecting answers. Once we have those answers, we will create a FAQ page on the main website with those answers.
Rob
A few people reached out to me and asked my opinion and I figured I’d throw in my two cents here.
Going open source isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it was a planned move. I’m hindsight, the announcement should’ve said the move to open source was in the road map and that might’ve helped to quiet the doomsday talk. I’ve been using corona for 6+ years and made some really good apps, plus quite a few bad ones. I even made some for businesses because it’s so easy to use.
However, what I do miss is the community involvement. I feel that the community has been largely ignored by Corona. Right or wrong, that’s how I feel. We used to have a weekly talk show, Corona Geek. This was a big thing for me because that was Corona talking directly with developers. I used to be able to comment on posts directly and although some post comments went sideways, i felt it was a good thing. Twitter and Facebook are largely inactive. I can’t remember the last time I heard from the owner. The previous holders were a lot more communicative. There’s not a lot of incentive for devs to write tutorials, hand out code snippets, etc, because, well, there’s nothing there.
I love the sdk and the ease of use. I don’t love the communication and lack of community feel. Right or wrong, that’s my two cents.
I agree. I was thinking the same thing last night. In that context I thought there was something I can do to help - I can start blogging about Corona SDK again. So I did!
Here are all my Corona blog posts, starting as you see in 2013 and including my new post last night: http://prairiewest.net/blog/tag/coronasdk/
I really enjoy coding in Lua, and Corona is a great product. If it appears to any newcomers that Corona community isn’t too active then that’s unfortunate, and anything I can do to help combat that is a good thing.
I think the ironic part for the community is (IMO) the documentation for Corona tends to be so good, I rarely find a need to come in the forums for questions, and most the time I see similar questions, the answer is just a link to the documentation.
Maybe Corona should break all of its API docs so we have to chat more? </sarcasm>
But seriously, I’ve been using Corona longer than most, and I’ve barely touched the forums here. I’m personally going to make a concentrated effort to be active in the Slack, as I find it more useful for dev conversations. Here’s hoping there’s enough of us interested in continued development in Corona in order to keep a conversation going and perhaps some collaboration on open source updates. :D
For Rob, I think if we could get some clear direction on where we should collect our ideas and communication on open source work, that would be great. I understand Git would probably hold issue tracking and progress, but something more user friendly to show what’s being worked on by the community (maybe like the Feature Request website?) would be ideal.
Thanks again to everyone at Corona, y’all keeping us alive 10 years strong.
I joined after Corona Geek sessions but I do agree that communication is terrible recently. It is like Corona tried to do corporate but lost the very thing that made it resonate with the indie dev!
A fatal mistake I think.
I speak to each and every player that reaches out as if they were my very first player.