I like the name. Yeah, impossible to find the perfect name and please everyone, but it’s a good name.
Solar2D - code at the speed of sunlight! The fastest game development framework this side of the galaxy.
T
Pretty funny that it uses Lua - Portuguese for moon if I’m not mistaken
Free slack has a 10,000 message history, so the duration depends on the frequency of the messages. One slack I’m in the history lasts less than a week.
I like the new name, nice meaning and easy to remember.
It’s still a work in progress but I’ve changed the URL etc for my gallery site so if you have any games to submit please do https://www.madewithsolar2d.com/
Great to hear, feels like a rebranding is absolutely necessary. Already getting tired of joking my way out when telling people about the Corona platform…
Solar2D, sound good to me!
I’m still not a fan of changing names. Admittedly I’m somewhat biased given we’re currently building coronamarketplace.com, but biased or not, there are so many other resources out there attached to the Corona brand. YouTube videos, blog posts, StackOverflow posts, all of the current forum posts, and so on.
The thing is, as developers any time we hit a stumbling block we search Google or SO for help. With a new name, all of the existing help built up over the years just disappears. There are no discussions about doing anything at all in “Solar2D”. There are no video samples. No forum threads. Nothing.
Seems to me that this is just going to make it harder for newcomers to find useful resources which is just going to make other frameworks look like more viable options to them.
@Richard Definitely true, but I think we have to find other ways to handle those problems. Newcomers will probably learn pretty quickly to search for both Corona and Solar to find information.
I just don’t see how the name Corona could be kept. Besides Apple and Google beating down on it, just mentioning Corona will put negative thoughts into peoples’ minds for a long, long time to come. And I believe that will make it harder to attract new developers to our framework. Without even thinking about why they do it, people looking for a 2D engine will probably just choose the one without the virus-resembling name… 
Well, the reality is simple. I’m the co-founder of a 40 strong branding studio so I have some experience.
A rebranding with a marketing push and launch campaign works well, often re-igniting interest in a forgotten product.
A rebranding without any marketing plan usually fails.
So I hope there’s some marketing effort and budget.
I think that’s what it all boils down to @thomas6. The platform is now open source and core development is funded by donations. It’s going to be a long time before there’s a marketing budget available and we need this open source approach to prove itself from the very beginning. Sure those of us in the current circle can update our resources inline with any new branding, but without good marketing those who wrote blog posts and engine comparison articles etc in the past aren’t going to jump onto updating those, and anybody stumbling onto Solar2D aren’t going to know to hit StackOverflow etc with Corona search terms to dig out old discussions. I feel we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot trying a budgetless rebrand at a time where the business model is already a stability concern and proving to the world that this framework is still comparable to other options is more important.
Honestly, if when I found Corona a couple of years ago I’d struggled to find anything about it on Google / SO / YouTube I’d have dismissed it immediately, before even checking out the forums. One of the very first things I do when looking at a new language is to check that people outside of the internal community are asking and answering questions. If there isn’t a good amount of available content on those mediums, I’ll just assume it’s not a good enough tool to put my time into.
We’ve seen how many long term Corona users recently posted that they were worried that the framework wasn’t going to stand up much longer. I recall @SGS coming pretty close to a migration because when you’re running a business around the games you build, it’s absolutely critical that the tools you’re using look like they’re going to be around long term. These are the thought processes of long term, loyal users willing to give more leniency to the platform. Newcomers have no need to be lenient at all and they’re looking for that same comforting feeling. They need to see that there’s help available everywhere they’re used to looking for it. That this isn’t just another short lived tool that’s cropped up overnight.
It’s cheesy I know, and perhaps slightly sadistic, but the saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” comes to mind 
Personally, I am excited. Sure, there’s work to be done, sure some old stack overflow threads will get lost, but with the open source future, it means that we all have a bigger part to play in Solar2D’s future.
It’s not a question of “we need a marketing budget to start marketing”. Sure, having a budget and buying ads is cool and all, but we can all pitch in at a personal level. An easy thing that everyone could do is to contribute to Vlad’s crowd funding campaigns. Then we also have Graham with his “made with Solar2D” showcase site. We have Scott and Richard with their upcoming marketplace sites. I am working on open source modules and plugins for Solar2D to make developing games even easier than it already is (first I need to go rename some files and strings btw!). Once I am done with them, I have some educational content planned. There are also some who’ve expressed their interest at designing logos and visual style for the new brand, etc.
Most of us probably have social media accounts or blogs, or perhaps a personal reddit account, right? Anyone and everyone of us could make a few posts or tweets about the new Solar2D once it launches or just tell your friends or fellow developers. There’s a lot that everyone of us can do without even spending a dime.
One of the simplest and most straightforward group effort would be to have that game jam session that some of us have talked about already. We are all already making games and we want to demonstrate how Solar2D can be used to make games, so what better way is there than to hold a game jam and release a bunch of games?
When Corona Labs Inc is gone and the future of Solar2D is left in our hands, then it is up to us to make it successful.
Standing on marketing, I am very happy to hear the news of the name change, thank you Rob, vlads and everyone help.
After all, we can’t stay on the thing with the same name as the virus, and another beer with the same name has been discontinued.
The only time human have successfully defeated a virus in history, that is, “Smallpox”, Smallpox is “DNA Virus”, and this time the virus is a more mutated threat “RNA Virus”, which is bound to become a long war.
So it is really good to change the name, Solar 2D is very nice. 
I really liked the name, I’m Brazilian and Lua is a Brazilian language, for those who don’t know, it was based on another language called Sol (Sun), so the name Solar fell very well, a great marriage of the Moon with the Sun.
I just think it could be SolarSDK, because Solar2D leaves the mark too attached to 2D, and if by chance in the future Does Solar have 3D support? would they rename the brand again? I do not think so! then SolarSDK would be more comprehensive. but Solar is an excellent name.
My input:
Corona -> Korona
Simple change, yet sounds the same and no relation to any virus.
“Solar” reminds me of the old “Solaris” Unix OS.
To anyone who is worried about 3D support being added to Corona/Solar2D at some stage and how that would mess up the name, don’t worry. There are many reasons why it will never happen, for instance:
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A 3D game engine is an entirely different beast from a 2D game engine. Changing the rendering pipeline from 2D to 3D would require a staggering amount of work and it’d probably be less work to just create an entirely new 3D game engine from scratch.
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Corona/Solar2D is one of the best, if not the best 2D game engines out there, but by becoming a 3D game engine as well, it’d start at the very bottom. It’s not a great look if you have the best 2D and the worst 3D.
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Working in 3D also requires a GUI and creating a GUI requires a lot of work. With pure 2D applications, a GUI would be nice and beginner friendly, but not necessary. However, with 3D applications it would be hell trying to position objects in a 3D scene with just code.
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It’s all about splitting resources. There is more than enough work that needs doing with everything being 2D. Adding 3D would just drain resources from everything else.
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Finally, why would anyone who needs to develop a 3D game now fund the development of a 2D engine being turned 3D over the course of several years when they could just download Unreal, Unity or Godot and start developing on a reliable 3D engine today?
Analyzing your questions now, you are absolutely right. 
Hi,
A rebrand is a great idea, current circumstances or not. I personally like the idea of SolarSDK over Solar2D, as it allows for future growth.
I think the key is a clean site with a very prominent call out to the documentation, which has always been excellent.
@richard11 I do agree with you about past resources, but at the time I started using Corona there wasn’t much around. I relied purely on the docs and this forum. Making sure there is a good social channel (apparently Slack) can be helpful as well. One could point out to newbies about searching for “Corona” resources.
And let’s be honest, Corona is not a super well known engine at this time. A rebrand probably affects us developers more than new users. Having something fresh (or the appearance of fresh) helps breath new life into it.
I guess I’ll need to rebrand Coronium Core to Solarium.
-dev
SDK will likely be a non-starter. We are not an SDK. This is why we moved away from CoronaSDK in the first place. An SDK is just a library and this product is more than just a library.
I also mentioned on Slack earlier (and I’ve not spoken to Vlad about it either), but the 2D doesn’t have to be part of the branding. It’s in the domain name, so it’s a bonus if 2D is in the brand, but perhaps not a hard requirement.
And then as far as Slack goes, we have what we have. It’s organized in to channels to have focused conversations, which are like having different sub-forums here. Anyway, this isn’t the place to discuss the pros and cons of Slack. If you want to discuss that open a new thread. Let’s keep this on re-branding.
Rob
This isn’t the place so I’ll keep it short, but for the record 3D scene positioning already works in my engine, without the need for a GUI 
. I learned from Blitz3D, back when that was a thing, that command line 3D doesn’t have the be complex. A lot of how my engine works is inspired by Blitz3D.
I’ll agree with your general point though. What we have is a 2D platform and that’s what it’ll likely always be.
@Richard, I agree that this isn’t the place so I’ll reply briefly. 
The issue with creating 3D scenes without a GUI is that you can’t see or even effectively estimate where display objects belong on an xyz-grid and how rotations across the different planes affect them. With a good GUI, you can drag and drop objects where you want, but without one all we can do is guesstimate.
With one or two objects, sure, you can guesstimate, but up that to tens, hundreds or thousands of objects per scene and now something that takes seconds to do with a GUI suddenly takes several replicate via by code, multiply that by each display object and you have your summer planned out creating a single scene.
Ok, more than a dozen objects and admittedly trying to visualise individual locations becomes a problem, but that’s just where loops or import functions come into play. It’s no different really to working with a tilemap. It wouldn’t be realistic to manually place every tile in a 2D platformer, but write a quick map loading routine and level editor and you’re away.