State of Corona?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

We desperately need an update about the state and future of Corona SDK. People have built businesses on this product and we need to know if Corona will continue to be supported or if it’s in a death spiral. Here’s why I ask:

  1. Constant rolling outages of the build server for over a month

  2. No new public build in over 1.5 years

  3. One DAILY build in the last 2 months

  4. No new blog post in almost 4 months

  5. No roadmap since 2018

  6. Little to no communication about where things stand or are going

Is Appodeal interested in supporting this product or not?  If not then they need to be honest and sell it, because there are people who will pay for a product that is fully supported.

#2

I like the statement (on their homepage) that " More than 500,000 developers and an active, helpful forum are not just facts. They’re all about 8 years of trust and inspiration in Corona. Our team is also there."

According to appbrain.com there are " over 3,000" Corona built apps on Google Play.  Now, either half a million Corona devs are really bad at releasing apps of the active cohort is rather small.

I wonder if Appodeal made a mistake in the acquisition and are simply not investing any time and money into the product.  Going open source has not helped at all, which is understandable given the tiny cohort and the subset of those that are remotely interested in developing core functionality.  I for one have no interest/skill set to do that.

I think a sale is probably the only way forward now, I imagine the price would be quite reasonable these days.

#3

I too am concerned about this after waiting days for a build to happen.

#4

I don’t think anybody will buy it. Github is already littered with abandoned 2d engines. I think Raj was a very good sales person and he managed to string together a set of sales that lined up his pockets. I don’t think Corona ever fit into Appodeal’s core products and as such they probably provide limited funding to keep the appodeal adapter up to date. I doubt there are 500K developers on Corona. Maybe 500K accounts that signed in at one point in time or another.

I for one don’t have any interest in owning a 2d engine company or helping build one. I make games everything else is a distraction.

#5

There’s not a single engine with the featureset of Corona (everything included, not just the most fun to implement rendering stuff but also multitarget build system, liveupdates, monetization plugins etc.) on github, not even remotely.

Also the switch to Unity etc. is not free either. Porting games, especially coded in a language as dynamic as Lua and maybe originally written by devs with not a lot of experience in different languages and portable code can become a little nightmare and a pretty huge task if it’s not just a basic casual game you can rewrite in a few days anyway.

In addition, if your revenues are >= $200k in the last 12 months you need a Unity license that’s $1800/year per user, i.e. whoever is part of your development team.

#6

I agree Unity is not free. It is fairly expensive.

https://github.com/moai/moai-dev

Moai comes close and it is for the most part abandoned. There are plugins for monetization that need to be updated and it does build for ios, windows and android. Not sure about live builds but that doesn’t work with all the plugins now. Still Lua and C++ so the same as Corona. It is ripe for somebody to create a simulator with buttons so they can build by pressing a button.

#7

Moai basically had it’s only short peak when it was used and kind of backed by DoubleFine, i.e about 5-8 years ago, last version tagged as stable from 2015, website not existing anymore.

There’s no reasonable reason anyone would use this over Corona - even if you’d want to add all the missing features and support for newer OS versions/requirements there’s a much much better framework available.

#8

Exactly my point. I mentioned the dead 2d engine as a reason why nobody would buy Corona. Why would anybody buy a 2d engine in 2020 as a business? As for the merits of corona, I love corona. But the facts are most businesses pick something other for their 2d. It is either they go native or they use unity or defold or godot (very rarely Corona).

#9

I do admit a pure 2D engine might be a tough sell now.

I suggested this a few years ago… Corona, with some investment, could morph into “unity lite”.  By this I mean cover the basics of 3D but with a nice friendly API.  Just enough to make hyper casual games like helix jump, etc.  This would make the framework much more appealing.

I’m sure we’d all like a bit of 3D in our games (without resorting to animations)… I know for sure that me and Michael could make great use of this!

#10

Hello everyone, a short contribution to this thread:

In my opinion, another of Corona’s strengths is its ability to do more than gaming, and therefore to mix gaming and “classic” functions in the same application.

I haven’t found any other SDK that allows me to do this: either you make a “serious” application, or you make a game, but not both at the same time in the same app. And that is exactly what I need.

That’s what really prevents me from abandoning Corona for now (unfortunately, because the situation looks really bad to me!)

#11

Corona is a much better and way more valuable starting point than Moai, so not a valid reason.

Still there’s of course not a huge market/businesscase in terms of buying the company/product and try to make it in to a real competitor to other engines. At this point in time it’s just pointless as the 2 big vendors have, at least now, an almost endless amount of cash. Worst case I went through was what happend to MarmaladeSDK. I’d prefer for Corona to just become a ownerless open source product rather than getting sold/resold for every decreasing amounts of money and with constantly shrinking interestes by new owners.

What I think could be an option, if there are enough devs with decent revenues and *if* Corona might become fully open source, that a fair supported patreon could support someone like Vlad (of course, just in case he would even be interested in doing so) keep working on the engine and it would still be cheaper for most of those devs than to move over to competitors. But that’s just a theoretical situation and I also don’t know the number of successful devs, I just positively impressed every now and then when I notice some other pretty good download numbers of Corona based games.

I have no idea what the burnrate of Corona these days might be - for reasonable reasons Rob would not tell us even if there would be only him and Vlad. But for whatever is visible to us from the outside, I even have a hard time believing Rob isn’t doing this more or less as a sparetime activity.

That said - my personal dream 2d engine would be a mix of Coroa (easy build for mobiles, monetization, livebuilds, marketplace, central plugin management) combined with another framework I absolutely *love* (for it’s clean and simple API, easy portability to even new hardware/consoles and of course the outstanding performance while still enjoying the dynamic nature of Lua). I can guarantee you your personal impression, as written on Slack, is pretty wrong when based on the actual framework.

3d would of course be cool too, but that’s quite a huge can of worms to open. It’d be very hard to make it good enough without users constantly requesting whatever feature they see supported by the big engines.

New platforms and a basic support of stuff required for users to do simple 3d themselves could be good enough. Like, think what Richard11 could’ve done with his 3d experiment without the need to try to fake it all in 2d rather than just sending 3d meshes to the GPU with correct perspective rendering and a depth buffer etc. I bet we’d have a small but nice 3d engine with a scene graph, object loading, maybe simple animation and some convenience features.

#12

@michealflad I would also contribute to the patreon if it comes to that and Vlad and Rob are willing. I think it is just a great idea. We just can’t beat them up while they are still employed by appodeal, they won’t want to help us at all afterwards.

#13

@agramonte

I agree. This must be very stressful for Corona staff. Once I tried a server break down for two days. It was a nightmare.

To me this is all about Appodeal neglecting Corona and not realising they have the best 2d mobile platform on their hands.

I would contribute to a patreon too if Corona went fully open source and community driven.

I would also be willing to put time and effort into the code base. I can’t justify doing that as long as it is owned by an ad company.

#14

For the record, I still haven’t permanently shelved the 3D engine. Just incomprehensibly busy right now with client projects that can’t not be prioritised. I literally have half of Qiso still open in tabs in my editor waiting for me to finish a couple of bits off so that I can push it’s altitude support live, and then I’ll be back on with the 3D work as soon as a weekend becomes available. It’s actually not hugely far off being ready for people to play with I don’t think, it’s just that free weekends never seem to crop up any more…

Not that my tinkering is the same as core functionality - just since it was mentioned :smirk:

#15

Of course, I just imagined what you could’ve done instead of fighting perspective distortion, splitting quads into smaller ones, doing manual depthsort (that still can’t work as soon as primitives intersect), hidden face removal etc. etc.

Free weekends are an illusion :slight_smile:

#16

I do keep toying with the idea of ditching the texture support completely so that UV mapping isn’t an issue and square faces can just go back to being 2 triangle - proper low poly minimalism. In reality I’ll probably at least end up with a flag on the createCube() etc methods so that you can either create a low poly shape or something split up better for texturing without noticeable distortion.

I also still keep toying with ideas for per-pixel depth buffering so that proper intersecting faces can work. I’ve not yet played with Corona’s memoryBitmap stuff but there’s a slim chance it’ll give me the necessary performance for this to be achievable. Also for the record, toying with the idea of rebuilding Qiso’s mask generation using this instead of writing to and reading from files as it might give better performance there too.

Anyway, this isn’t the place for another of my ramblings. :zipper_mouth_face:

#17

Tell me about it. Weekends, for me, seem to just be the time I get to do the stuff I’ve fallen behind with. :smiley:

Also, I wouldn’t sell 2D game engines short. The majority of top grossing games on mobile have been, and still are, 2D. To make things even better, 2D games are generally easier, cheaper and faster to develop as well.

I do have plans on one day migrating from 2D mobile games to 3D adventure RPGs for desktop/console, but for as long as I’m creating for mobile, I’ll stick to 2D.

#18

@xedur Currently I don’t think I’ll ever create a 3d game. I love 2d and Corona is a great 2d engine. What I was trying to say is I just don’t know how many companies would be willing to buy a 2d engine. There is no real revenue with mobile games being mostly free. Desktop games are mostly 3d. No VC money unless you are unity or doing 3d virtual reality. A middle of the road ad network with VC money might pick it up? A large studio? But most of those “studios” are fairly engine agnostic. Some good sales person that can figure out how to flip it a couple of times for a profit? Maybe.

#19

2D to 3D is like single player to multiplayer.  You really need a compelling reason for all the bloat.  You also need a good IDE for 3D - especially for novice users.

I was playing around with some 3D ideas but for now I’ll stick with shading and cheer Richard on! ; )

#20

@agramonte, but all top grossing games are free to play. What do you mean there isnt money? Sure a product that is 100% free with no iap wont make a lot of money but no one expects that it would. In mobile space 2d is the way to go. I dont understand why advertisets would buy an sdk to begin with - I saw the previous owners were perk. Just make a plugin and thats it. No need to buy it. A game company buying an engine makes more sense. Any company really could make money if monetised and marketed correctly. If i were to buy corona, my first step would be to market more, and market corona as a 2d game engine only. Direct all future development to game side.