Most of the Engines out there use programming languages such C# and C++ and they target new generation consoles. Will it be possible for Corona to target consoles such as the PlayStation or Xbox in the near future??
From what i know probably not even close…The other day i got an email from corona labs and it said that they just released or are going to release windows and mac app and game dev… but my guess is they worked on this for a really long time… so they prob wont get game console support for a while… but you never know!
I don’t know if we would consider PS platforms in the future, but for now, we are not working on it and we probably won’t in the near future.
Rob
Rob, so can you really build apps for pc and mac? if so how?
@Rob,
I would like to know if “LUA” as a programming language is the culprit for not being able to build to these platforms.Or is it more like not having enough man power to get the job done?
@SonicX278,
Just download the latest build!
Thanks
No, Lua isn’t the culprit. Let me try to explain why Playstations (or other platforms) will be very hard for us to do.
Corona SDK is based not only on Lua (which is actually built with C++!), but on OpenGL. Lua itself doesn’t know how to put an image on the screen and move it around. To do that, Corona Labs had to write a bunch of C++ functions that could be called from the Lua engine and translate that into OpenGL calls. For things like opening files, Lua under the hood uses the standard C library of functions that come with Unix based operating systems. So every API call you make (display.*, audio.*, etc.) had to be built by a Corona Engineer.
Since Apple needs OS-X to build for iOS, all of the underlying technology was there to tie the Lua language engine to the required API’s to make all of the stuff work. Since OS-X and iOS are reasonably similar, we were able to build a simulator that got things close to what the device would, and other things were device specific. OS-X is based on the FreeBSD Unix operating system as is iOS.
Bring Android into the picture. Google chose to use Linux to build Android upon. While it’s not a full Linux OS, the Kernel (main OS) is Linux based. Android also uses OpenGL for the screen like iOS (and OS-X). While doing many things on Android required us to write a bunch of stuff in Java to work, at least the underlying technologies (OpenGL, Lua being able to be compiled for the source and link to our APIs, and the standard Unix C library being around allowed us to support both platforms.
While we love Macs and they are a great development platform, the reality is that many Android developers are Windows based. Windows prefers Direct X for graphics, but there are enough developers that OpenGL has been ported to Windows and MIcrosoft Supports it in addition to Direct X. Microsoft’s developer tools were friendly enough for us to make the simulator work and work with the Android libraries.
Now supporting OS-X and WIn32.exe builds are reasonably possible because we have the simulators.
Sony uses a proprietary operating system for their consoles. They have their own API calls for drawing. I was unable to confirm if you could use OpenGL or not, but knowing Sony and how Console’s work in general, I doubt that that Sony would use open source features. So for us to build for Playstation’s we would very likely have to start from ground zero and with a team of our size, that’s just not practical. Moving to other open source friendly platforms are more practical than something that’s very closed off.
Rob
@Rob,
Thank you for putting all of this in layman’s terms. Now I understand some of the challenges you guys face in developing such a great SDK!
Keep up the good work.
Thanks again.
From what i know probably not even close…The other day i got an email from corona labs and it said that they just released or are going to release windows and mac app and game dev… but my guess is they worked on this for a really long time… so they prob wont get game console support for a while… but you never know!
I don’t know if we would consider PS platforms in the future, but for now, we are not working on it and we probably won’t in the near future.
Rob
Rob, so can you really build apps for pc and mac? if so how?
@Rob,
I would like to know if “LUA” as a programming language is the culprit for not being able to build to these platforms.Or is it more like not having enough man power to get the job done?
@SonicX278,
Just download the latest build!
Thanks
No, Lua isn’t the culprit. Let me try to explain why Playstations (or other platforms) will be very hard for us to do.
Corona SDK is based not only on Lua (which is actually built with C++!), but on OpenGL. Lua itself doesn’t know how to put an image on the screen and move it around. To do that, Corona Labs had to write a bunch of C++ functions that could be called from the Lua engine and translate that into OpenGL calls. For things like opening files, Lua under the hood uses the standard C library of functions that come with Unix based operating systems. So every API call you make (display.*, audio.*, etc.) had to be built by a Corona Engineer.
Since Apple needs OS-X to build for iOS, all of the underlying technology was there to tie the Lua language engine to the required API’s to make all of the stuff work. Since OS-X and iOS are reasonably similar, we were able to build a simulator that got things close to what the device would, and other things were device specific. OS-X is based on the FreeBSD Unix operating system as is iOS.
Bring Android into the picture. Google chose to use Linux to build Android upon. While it’s not a full Linux OS, the Kernel (main OS) is Linux based. Android also uses OpenGL for the screen like iOS (and OS-X). While doing many things on Android required us to write a bunch of stuff in Java to work, at least the underlying technologies (OpenGL, Lua being able to be compiled for the source and link to our APIs, and the standard Unix C library being around allowed us to support both platforms.
While we love Macs and they are a great development platform, the reality is that many Android developers are Windows based. Windows prefers Direct X for graphics, but there are enough developers that OpenGL has been ported to Windows and MIcrosoft Supports it in addition to Direct X. Microsoft’s developer tools were friendly enough for us to make the simulator work and work with the Android libraries.
Now supporting OS-X and WIn32.exe builds are reasonably possible because we have the simulators.
Sony uses a proprietary operating system for their consoles. They have their own API calls for drawing. I was unable to confirm if you could use OpenGL or not, but knowing Sony and how Console’s work in general, I doubt that that Sony would use open source features. So for us to build for Playstation’s we would very likely have to start from ground zero and with a team of our size, that’s just not practical. Moving to other open source friendly platforms are more practical than something that’s very closed off.
Rob
@Rob,
Thank you for putting all of this in layman’s terms. Now I understand some of the challenges you guys face in developing such a great SDK!
Keep up the good work.
Thanks again.