Your arguments unfortunately sound convincing…
While I agree with almost everything said by everyone in this thread at the moment … Unity probably can’t afford to give away the engine for free because they earn that much from their paying users. If they took all the money from the last funding round infos can be found about, they, by now, got more than a *billion* dollars from investors.
Also … Löve has been around since at least 2008, so maybe longer than Corona, GameMaker is even way way older.
Of course all this doesn’t help and I’d love to see some info about what’s really going on at the moment. Corona is very good at what it does for development on mobiles and live builds - it’s faster to have a code change on multiple devices compared to Unity just updating it’s IDE state when you edited some C# code in an external editor and move back to Unity.
Unity is definitely propped up by VC but the features available to new devs is amazing. There used to be an argument to use Corona for 2D but that is long gone now.
Yeah, Corona was good… but with no new features or moving the platform forward (apart from meeting store requirements - albeit way past the deadline) it is all but dead.
Point in question, we should have had full Switch integration by now, I still get sad receiving the Nintendo invites I but know it is pointless…
As sad as it is… It is now time to re-platform.
I believe that a big reason as to why so many people are upset is because they love Corona so much. In my opinion it is the best iOS/Android game engine there is. With a few small tweaks, it’d become the best for desktop as well. I also like the community!
I can relate to not wanting to give any updates when there is nothing new to report. As a programmer, it doesn’t make sense to me to make posts like “nothing new to report”. As a marketer, however, I think that communication is the key. Lack of communication, whether it is typical for the company, like for Corona, it isn’t good as it makes people speculate and come up with doomsday scenarios whether or not they are justified.
Still, all things said, I look forward to this mess clearing up soon and to hearing what is planned for Corona in the future (as we were supposed to learn before all this started).
Sad it is indeed! :mellow:
Unity offers an impressive range of features. But, for me, it also remains a heavy and relatively complex environment.
Right now, I’m doing a little testing on Defold and Gideros, but I’m still not convinced.
I’m trying to find out what changed today. The outage was only 3.5 hours instead of the 7-13 hours on previous days. I’ll post more when I know more.
Rob
Off topic.
Unity is the king, no doubt, but Corona is much simpler, easier and really good in 2d games and apps.
Defold needs many things to compete with Corona (they might catch up and be even better in the future, I can’t know that).
I don’t consider Gideros a serious opponent for Corona or anyone else.
Corona is still bigger and better than Defold and Gideros.
If we had 64bit on time and improved monetization plugins nobody would talk about Corona’s swangsong.
Completely 100% I’m NOT saying that everything is / was all these years peachy.
But what is really?
For what it’s worth, everything’s back to normal for me. Authorizing and building are working normally and rather quickly, for both iOS and Android. But still: the problem appeared without explanation? And now it disappears, still without explanation?
But what’s the point if for all intents and purposes no-one knows Corona exists? Even if it had AI that could code your game for you, upload it to the store and then book your next holiday with the proceeds, it’s all pointless if Corona just hides in the corner waiting for people to trip over it, then download a public build that wouldn’t actually work. Imagine downloading the latest Unity LTS version and you couldn’t actually release stuff built with it?
We’re lucky, we discovered it, but how many new topics are on this board per day? 2-3 max? It’s hardly a hive of activity. At what point do Corona’s 76th owners tire of not making any money and just shut it down? If you’re a hobbyist, probably not an issue. If you’re someone like SGS, with Corona games out there supporting his family, can you risk it all coming crashing down? I’m somewhere in the middle as games are no longer my main source of income, but I’d be pretty gutted if five years worth of work on one of my projects went up in smoke.
I actually did start porting to Unity, but for the type of project I was doing it just got frustrating waiting 5-10 seconds for each change to compile and another 5-10 seconds to get into the game. So in terms of a game engine and development environment, Corona is right up there. In terms of a business that’s trying to grow and compete, it isn’t one.
I get that it’s open source now, so technically it could be rescued if the owners walk away. But if they don’t understand their own build servers enough to get a serious problem fixed within two weeks, what chance does anyone else stand?
@nick_sherman I can’t agree with you more.
About forum activity, some smart and helpful guys stoped writing and that costs a lot.
It was like they were working for Corona and people couldn’t stop asking them things and getting great responses.
Imho Corona will change hands in the near (or not) future, probably the current owner will do the same.
Personally I still use Corona for small business apps and games.
Still having a nice income too, although it’s not my main job.
Let’s hope for the best!
Did you get any updates Rob? So far the build server is working today too without any outages. Fingers crossed for good news!
@nick, I know we’ve discussed this over the years about the complete failure of the Marketing of Corona. I simply do not understand why the don’t do anything!
Each buyout seems to get worse and worse to the point that no-one really cares about Corona as a product. IMHO, the move to open source was just a big red “we can’t maintain/improve this much longer” flag. Fine if you’re MySQL but some niche SDK not so.
The core API is good but every other platform leaves it for dead with IDE’s, proper debuggers, profilers, particle designers, UI designers, etc… I can’t remember the last time something new was added.
And to have a public build that is not compatible with Google Play is simply inexcusable if you ask me.
I do have to agree with SGS about the lack of proper public builds. This issue has been brought up several times in the past and we’ve always been told something along the lines of “Corona is indeed due for a new public build and we’ll see about addressing that issue”, but nothing has happened yet.
In the past six months or so, I think I’ve helped five-ish people on the forums by telling them to update Corona to the newest daily build as they had issues with their now over 1.5 years old public build. The public build is what more than 99.99% of new users download and if it isn’t compatible with one of Corona’s largest target app stores, then you’ve got a big problem.
But what to do then?
I don’t use Corona for my own creations but for my clients, who are varied. And Corona’s strength was precisely to offer flexibility to meet very different demands. I tested alternatives but found nothing that was simultaneously flexible, quick to deploy and efficient… the only alternative seems to be to have different environments depending on the needs.
Release a new public build. Just that. I don’t know what sort of process they have concerning it, but it shouldn’t be difficult to just take the next daily build and release it as a public build. That way newcomers will not download an old broken version.
The strengths that you mentioned are still there. This public versus daily build issue doesn’t affect us “hardcore users” directly, but it does affect every new user and it just looks bad if someone is googling around to compare engines and the first result that they get by googling “Corona SDK” is “Stable release: 2018.3326 / July 10, 2018; 18 months ago”.
Vlad is working on the plugins, Rob is an all-around player and I guess there a couple of coders working daily too.
That’s not enough.
Much more people visit this site and use Corona SDK than most of the other SDKs mentioned above.
There is absolutely no reason not to invest some money for stuff and advertising.
Of course it’s a bet but it’s as safe as it can be.
Seems obvious… on paper. 3 weeks with recurring problems is a sign among many others that there is a loss of internal know-how with a team probably undersized
You are joking right?
No, I’m not.
Excluding Unity, Corona SDK is not behind Gideros or Defold.
Maybe professional game developers know the 2D-engine market better. But the beginners, like me, use articles on their local languages, and that articles are 1) always outdated 2) have 3-5 most famous engines. Corona, for example, was in the list of each of the articles I’ve read. So he is right.