I just mess around with programming in my spare time. I’m looking to start an RPG tile map style game soon, and the lay language appeals to me. I don’t really care about mobile features at the moment, although that’s definitely a good export feature if I change my mind. My question is corona well suited to a “larger” full size game and not just simpler mobile games? More specifically would the performance hold up on mac or pcs? Or would I be better suited for now with something like love2d since I’m not really concerned with the mobile market, or selling anything for that matter? I believe corona has a lot more features than love, but just inquiring about anyone’s experience with it for a non-mobile game and how it went. Thanks for any input!
Hey @charlie23. Welcome to the Corona Labs forums.
Most of a software’s limitations are due to hardware limitations. As an example, you will find mobile devices where the maximum texture size is 2048x2048 while on a desktop it might be 8192x8192 or greater. I believe (without checking that macOS has a limit of 16,536x16,536. Mobile devices are lucky to have 1GB of RAM of which less than 1/4th of that is available to apps and desktops usually have way more than that with low end computers in the 2-4gb range + video memory. The CPU’s on desktops are considerably faster than mobile CPUs.
Corona is of course designed to work at a very high level on Mobile devices which means it should screen for a desktop app. Lua as a scripting language is also designed to run very efficiently. From a technology standpoint, Love2D is built upon many of the same technologies that Corona is built upon, like OpenGL, OpenAL etc. There are three areas where we feel we excel over Love2D.
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We’ve been building our platform since 2009. We have spent those years optimizing our code and creating very solid platform.
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We have a deep, rich and logical set of API calls to do the work you need. We have an ecosystem that includes community plugins and native support to extend Corona even further.
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Our API’s and system is very well documented and we have a fantastic community to back it up.
We have several people who publish exclusively to PC and Mac platforms. We have people who also focus on TV apps and games as well. Our games can be found on itch.io, Steam, the Mac App Store and more.
Rob
Note: It is a misconception to think of mobile games as simple. Certainly, many one touch games you see are simple, but there are many massively complicated and deep mobile games on the market.
In today’s world mobile development == desktop development when it comes to complexity, knowledge requirements, tools, etc.
Update: Corona is plenty powerful and complete to make mobile and desktop games
Thanks for the great replies! No games are really simple to program, my main concern was a lot of the mobile geared development environments tend to buckle under larger projects, so that was my main concern before committing. I’m used to straight coding so environments like unity are more complicated to me than just coding, and seem to hinder me more than helping. Seems like corona is a great product to try, especially for free! Thanks!
We try to strike a balance between flexibility, powerful and simplicity and I think we do a pretty good job at that.
Rob
Hey @charlie23. Welcome to the Corona Labs forums.
Most of a software’s limitations are due to hardware limitations. As an example, you will find mobile devices where the maximum texture size is 2048x2048 while on a desktop it might be 8192x8192 or greater. I believe (without checking that macOS has a limit of 16,536x16,536. Mobile devices are lucky to have 1GB of RAM of which less than 1/4th of that is available to apps and desktops usually have way more than that with low end computers in the 2-4gb range + video memory. The CPU’s on desktops are considerably faster than mobile CPUs.
Corona is of course designed to work at a very high level on Mobile devices which means it should screen for a desktop app. Lua as a scripting language is also designed to run very efficiently. From a technology standpoint, Love2D is built upon many of the same technologies that Corona is built upon, like OpenGL, OpenAL etc. There are three areas where we feel we excel over Love2D.
-
We’ve been building our platform since 2009. We have spent those years optimizing our code and creating very solid platform.
-
We have a deep, rich and logical set of API calls to do the work you need. We have an ecosystem that includes community plugins and native support to extend Corona even further.
-
Our API’s and system is very well documented and we have a fantastic community to back it up.
We have several people who publish exclusively to PC and Mac platforms. We have people who also focus on TV apps and games as well. Our games can be found on itch.io, Steam, the Mac App Store and more.
Rob
Note: It is a misconception to think of mobile games as simple. Certainly, many one touch games you see are simple, but there are many massively complicated and deep mobile games on the market.
In today’s world mobile development == desktop development when it comes to complexity, knowledge requirements, tools, etc.
Update: Corona is plenty powerful and complete to make mobile and desktop games
Thanks for the great replies! No games are really simple to program, my main concern was a lot of the mobile geared development environments tend to buckle under larger projects, so that was my main concern before committing. I’m used to straight coding so environments like unity are more complicated to me than just coding, and seem to hinder me more than helping. Seems like corona is a great product to try, especially for free! Thanks!
We try to strike a balance between flexibility, powerful and simplicity and I think we do a pretty good job at that.
Rob