There is difference. You can make concave chain body hollow inside. Polygon body, as I remember, must be 8 vertices max, convex and you cannot use inner space.
Maybe polygon bodies are faster, because there is no additional load on engine to count inner space and concave spaces. But really, if you have few bodies with only ten/twenty/thirty vertices running on phones better than i.e. Samsung Galaxy S1 this is irrelevant.
Depends on situation. If you need ease of use + possibility to create convex bodies/spline bodies/arcs/extremely complicated bodies assembled from array of lines with possibility to change it’s shape + extremely perverted inconceivable modifications -> body created using chains is your choice. But if you need to create simplest convex body that maybe will be cloned in amount of thousands on worst 2000’s device -> use simple shape forms.
Other example: I need to create thousand different body shapes from pictures where shapes will surely have more than 8 vertices, will be maybe convex and maube concave and maybe with usefull inner space. Because I’m beginner with Lua, I will open new project in MS Visual Basic and will write program (.NET version can open png with alpha channel) to easily get array of bits of image, loop through it’s mask to identify key points (future vertices) and to output generated Lua-style or json code for an array of shape vertices that is ready to use in Corona. Last thing is to drop all these thousand images on this programm to get thousand ready to use shapes.
Thanks for your time to prepare simple project for me:)
Offtopic: Corona is ONE and ONLY tool that is working from box without additional dancing with drum. It’s simply working and have many examples.
Gideros doesn’t compile programs and after two hours of anguish I couldn’t get it to work
LOVE is something strange and not working properly from box and not so simple as it wants to look like.
UNITY is very simple only on first look of youtube overviewers but too hard to make something if you are lower grade than highly-trained professional, realy, you will loose yourself in two lines of code.
That’s why we are looking walkarounds instead of simply changing tool ))