Which game SDK is the best?

Everyone - I want to address some of the points in this thread with 4 quick comments:

  1. The first is around future roadmap. As Walter wrote very recently, we will soon have a public roadmap and much more transparency about what is being built next. We are right in the middle of planning around this, but it is coming. Bear with us for a bit longer.

  2. We don’t see a dichotomy between serving beginner developers and advanced developers. We are doing both already. And while we are getting demand from large studios (hence Corona Enterprise), this work will also benefit smaller developers. More to come on this as well.

These 2 are about the talk around Gideros and our perceived weaknesses. People above have mentioned:

  1. Corona builds that touch our servers - this has not been a real issue with any developer so far. While we agree that, in theory, some developers may perceive risk here, we don’t think that is warranted for the following reasons:
  • We have a very good track record of uptime
  • We do not take possession of any graphic assets or raw code, so your IP is safe
  • The company is strong financially and is not going anywhere

Furthermore, this way of building gives us significant advantages, especially in 2 areas:

  • We can make certain updates much more nimbly and without requiring developers to download new software to their computers
  • We will be able to provide a very strong developer experience around certain services coming down the road. We have done little here, but there are exciting things coming.
  1. Native code integration - this is something that we are working on and will expose relatively soon. So we are not shying away from doing it - it just takes time to do these things correctly. As mentioned above, stay tuned :slight_smile:

That’s it for now. Hope this helps. I don’t intend to engage on a big discussion since we have a lot to work on :slight_smile: But I thought this could inform the discussion.

Thanks everyone.

David [import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101395[/import]

I’m a little depressed to hear the news about Carlos’ departure even though I never knew who he was and am BRAND new to Corona.

Has the company made a statement to reassure everyone that Corona will still be #1? :S [import]uid: 141560 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101402[/import]

Walter, the co-founder and David Rangel the COO are saying the right things.

[import]uid: 19626 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101413[/import]

David - Thank you for your response. I like the tone and reassurance.

I understand that remote compiling is core to the subscription-based business model you have. Still makes me nervous, though.

I’ll be watching the product roadmap updates eagerly. Please discuss HTML5-integration for publishing webapps and if it is not on the road map, why. With Appcelerator buying a box2D gaming SDK last fall and other competitors like cocos2d-X-HTML5 rising, I’m concerned that they may have a stronger/broader long term vision. But I love Corona and want it to keep pace.

Thanks! [import]uid: 135391 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101414[/import]

Thanks for the info, David! :slight_smile: [import]uid: 10389 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101510[/import]

Appreciate the response from David.

Still hate the fact that Native code integration will only be done relatively soon

Hope ‘relatively soon’ is not too long!

Cheers! [import]uid: 64174 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 101539[/import]

I hope “relatively soon” will come before the time to renew my subscription to Corona, because otherwise these other options now seem more promising even if still in the infancy. :slight_smile: [import]uid: 80100 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 104188[/import]

Hi David,
Regarding Native Code Integration, will it be available only in Corona Enterprise which is an upgrade product and therefore will come with a premium price tag? I think Gideros already has this as a plug-in which comes standard with the product. This may be a deciding factor for indie developers to go with Gideros.

Thanks,
Ruben
Newbie and trial user [import]uid: 157156 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 114800[/import]

Ruben, Right now Corona Enterprise is the only way to do native code integration. As mentioned previously, we are working on ways to bring some of this functionality to Indie/Pro devs. This is still several weeks out though. [import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 114820[/import]

Just thought to chime in here; I would be curious to know what specific things people are looking to use native support for? Is it one of those nice to have but rarely used?

Along with our own experience in developing games in Corona and working with many games developers, we really can’t find anything specific that the Corona SDK doesn’t already do.
Agreed you may able to add capabilities sooner than Corona supports them, but IMHO as an Indie developer my priority is to make sure that I have a stable and verified SDK from Corona rather than having to spend resources and time debugging and increasing my time to market. [import]uid: 144378 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 114823[/import]

M-Game Minion brings up an excellent post and this would be useful feedback for us as well.

What do you guys want to build in if you had native support tomorrow?
[import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 114848[/import]

I have came across many situations where I needed to expand Corona.
For example, I had to turn down a very interesting project because it required a camera overlay.
Zip support would come extremely handy.
Ideally, I would really want to be able to create custom mesh objects, or at last operate on UV coordinates of existing display objects/meshes. More control over OpenGL, in general. Ability to turn off ortho view in OpenGL viewport and so allow for simple 2.5 transformations…
More control over blending modes and programmable pipeline / shaders… Frame buffers to create blur/depth of field effects… Writing a simple particle engine in C… the list goes on :slight_smile: [import]uid: 80100 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 114901[/import]

Not that I would do it tomorrow (since I’m swamped with other things, but…)

  1. Integrate Gree
  2. Integrate AdMob
  3. Integrate Amazon IAP
  4. Integrate Amazon’s Game Center
  5. Use TestFlight’s SDK
  6. Work with the facebook 3.0 beta on their API

Personally, I’m interested in more photo manipulation bits like doing barcode scanning. Looking into getting into PassCode with iOS 6.0

[import]uid: 19626 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 115200[/import]

Hi, We’ve also been asking ourselves the same question.

We are currently using Corona SDK and find it really great (has it’s limitations of course but I’m talking overall)

We’ve also been toying around with MOAI lately. It is more lower level than Corona, is open source and you can extend it easily in C++. It also supports publishing to chrome.
Bottom line after playing around with it quite a lot I find Corona much more mature and the deployment process is much much easier (it’s a nightmare with MOAI)
It also misses some really basic stuff like a native keyboard in Android :slight_smile:
Still it has many features that Corona doesn’t have I especially liked the native shaders support and particle engine.
Regarding your fear of loosing Corona’s support in 10 years… well I share the same feeling. But while playing around with MOAI I was able in 4 days of work to write a lua based bridge framework that mimics Corona’s API and was able to run a game I wrote for Corona in MOAI ! (I’ve covered display.*, transition.*, easing.*, timer.*, audio.*, system.*, and Runtime.*).
My bridge is not complete at all (only supports our first most basic game), but it was a prototype just to see how I can handle such a dooms day :slight_smile:
I also truly believe from my experience that such a bridge will get published by someone sometime as it’s quite easy to do…

So bottom line as long as you believe lua is here to stay and there are quite a few lua based solutions, worst case you can always implement such a bridge by your own and have all your games work as is. But for now I’m going to stick with Corona just because it’s more robust and the time it saves me is worth much more than $400 a year…

[import]uid: 80469 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 115221[/import]

Corona is the best for 2D, really. More complex projects would be served well by Unity 3D. That way, even a small / single person studio can have a decent shot, at least as freelancers. [import]uid: 67641 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 116133[/import]

Hey everyone - I wanted to circle back on this thread. Thanks for the posts and comments - this is useful.

Just to make a couple of final points:

  1. Corona Enterprise lets you do basically everything mentioned above. We now have a pricing tier that is more indie-friendly, for small companies. If you are interested, feel free to email me (david@coronalabs)
  2. We are still working away at the aforementioned plug-in framework that will probably cover more than 80% of the needs you have around this. We’ll have more info soon.

Thanks,

David [import]uid: 10668 topic_id: 24782 reply_id: 116944[/import]