Solar2D is doing great and arguably much better now than in was under Corona Labs Inc. There are more people working and contributing to Solar2D now than there were before and the future is looking bright.
And no, Solar2D does not have a visual editor like in Unity. However, after a bit of learning, you’ll find that you don’t really even need an editor for 2D games.
Worth adding that “the developer” is @vlads who towards the end of Coronalabs was the only active developer working there. He knows this product inside out, is generously funded by a number of community members, and is very active on the Solar2D Discord.
This isn’t just a community fork of a product that once was, it’s more a rebrand by the same developer who was already building it, except that as an open source product we can all help in certain areas. Some people are submitting code updates, others are working on the documentation, others are backing financially. There’s even a Linux fork happening. We’ve replaced the old marketplace too with https://www.solar2dplugins.com so developers can still share, or sell, their work despite the old Coronalabs marketplace becoming defunct.
The problem we had under the Coronalabs label, towards the end at least, was a lack of communication. They were very quiet about how many people actually worked there and how financially successful they were/weren’t, and they were reluctant to give lead times on a number of developments. This all led to concerns that they wouldn’t be able to hit Google/Apple API change deadlines, or that they’d one day just call it quits and abandon the product. This is what Vlad and the open source move has fixed. Everybody is happy bow, because we know exactly what the situation is.
Go to Solar2D.com, download one of the latest versions from GitHub and start developing. No worries Developers from Corona SDK days are still developing and releasing their projects with those new releases so it’s still reliable as it was before.
There are newly released and updated games available using Solar2D. Look for your plugins in Free Plugins Directory, Solar2D Marketplace and Solar2D Plugins. If you can’t find them there, check to see if it’s archived somewhere to be referenced. After doing so, everything should be working.
Since solor2d don’t have editor does it take time to build this scence since I do everything in code (by mentioning x,y coords of each and every tile set )?
Our plugin, Qiso, supports loading in isometric maps generated by Tiled as well as creating them manually in code. It incoprorates path-finding and things like swapping out tile sprites on entry/exit to make doors etc work with very little effort. We’re also working on a Qiso map editor because there are a few features that Tiled just isn’t good for - like altitude, though that’s not yet in the public release.
Developers from Corona SDK days are still developing and releasing their projects with those new releases so it’s still reliable as it was before.