Leaving Corona SDK, thanks though

General (non-technical) Off-Topic
#1

Dear Corona staff,

I am really thankful for all the support you have been giving in the forums, you seem like the best people ever.
The Corona SDK has been brilliant for prototyping, and it has really shown me the way into Lua programming.

But things turned sour when I really got further into it, because there are a lot of things that are out of the developers hands, such as drawing and updating in the Lua code. Furthermore, every stable release and daily build seems to work almost totally independent of one another, and we have had to cherry pick different daily builds for different releases, since what works in one build doesn’t work in another, and vice versa.

These problems are really serious for people trying to make a living from these games, so we are moving on to MOAI instead. You are introducing new features (which bring with it more memory/space consumption and bugs) far too often and fixing them far too rarely. And it seems that the community complaining doesn’t help much. Either stabilise your code instead of lipsticking it, or go open source, is my humble opinion.

I don’t mean any disrespect, but we really need more control and reliability in our projects.

You really have been a huge part of getting me started with Lua, though.
Thanks for making my introduction to a new programming language fun.
[import]uid: 117153 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 329309[/import]

#2

I’ve been taking a look at MOAI recently and appreciate that it seems like a framework with more depth.

However…

It’s worth taking a look at some of the threads in the MOAI forum, particularly this one:

http://getmoai.com/forums/it-s-too-early-for-moai-shameful-rant-t901/

Seems like there’s some grumblings, particularly over the lack of documentation and SDK support - an area I believe Corona excels at.

Some times the grass isn’t always greener. [import]uid: 33275 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117857[/import]

#3

same as @SegaBoy I’ve been taking a look at MOAI someday, cause i want my app have admob support, but It is not easy to startup without any document support, in the meantime, i thinking Corona is easy to start a app. hope have more support from Corona [import]uid: 22631 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117870[/import]

#4

Been there done that, MOAI sucks hundred times more the Corona - no matter what :slight_smile:

Joakim [import]uid: 81188 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117914[/import]

#5

kasplask - We are really sorry to hear that, but respect your decision. And thanks for the honest feedback (and friendly tone!).

If you are interested at all, I’d love to hear more specific feedback on the issues you had in terms of functionality and daily build issues. We think that daily builds do generally work well and build on each other, but it’s inevitable that we will have some regressions at times.

Please feel free to email me: davidATcoronalabsDOTcom. Again, I would very much like to hear the feedback. And if I can help somehow I’d be more than happy to do so.

David [import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117938[/import]

#6

Joakim - thanks. We are glad we suck less :wink:
[import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117939[/import]

#7

I like Moai, I like Corona SDK. I don’t hide that and I appreciate that CoronaLabs doesn’t get all uptight when people say things like that.

I’m sure I’ll be doing some apps with Moai in the future, but all my “near future” apps will be done with Corona - mainly because while there are some limitations, the speed of development (if you can live within those limitations) can’t be beat.

I understand the frustration with the moving target presented by the Daily Builds, but you don’t HAVE to use those – if you stick with the last stable release you can work-around any known problems, etc., without having to continually update code, switch to different builds, etc.

It may be that you need a specific daily build for something, but in general, NOT living on the bleeding edge can often make your development time more productive.

Jay
[import]uid: 9440 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117940[/import]

#8

It’s not that we’ve been wanting to be on the bleeding edge all the time, we just want things to work like they are documented. It’s totally acceptable if they don’t, but the lack of transparency gives us far too little in terms of figuring out what the problems are. For one out of several examples, we had painful issues interfacing with sqlite while getting the IAPs to work on both iOS and Android with the same build. So much so that we’ve had to go back and forth to look for the optimal builds.

MOAI isn’t as easy and supported as Corona SDK, of course, but we are no longer looking for a beginner’s environment. I am currently doing the PC port of our game with Love2D, and just digging into what it allows me to do, partially because it’s open source, has been such an eye opener. MOAI doesn’t suck, it’s just harder to use :slight_smile: Most of the problems with MOAI I’ve seen so far could have been solved by reading more, and properly understanding what you are dealing with.

Corona is great family fun and quick development, all that stuff, and that’s good for a small handheld game, but we really want to scale our projects up, meaning that we must have full control and not rely on submitting our code to a proprietary service every time we compile it. Plus, we need more immediate support for PC platforms (Linux/Win/Mac).

Corona is a fantastic tool for some, but it’s just too limiting for us. [import]uid: 117153 topic_id: 29309 reply_id: 117949[/import]