I will have to say goodbye for a little bit :(

strancali

Guys, I hate to do this but I have no other choice but to use a different software FOR NOW. I need to get an app out by the end of the month. Gideros as great as it is, does not have enough tutorials, samples (like the other sdk) for someone who is new to lua to start out with. So this is not goodbye but a "see you later" departure lol. I will be back to using Gideros and support this wonderful community in the months to come. I just want to let my fellow Giderosians know that I'm not abandoning you guys .

Sid

ar2rsawseen

Hey it's ok

Gideros is great for games, but for example, you can't handle native UI for standard apps right now, so I'm myself sitting on two frameworks.

Only thing you might do is to share your obstacles, what couldn't you accomplish, is there a lack of specific features or something. Help us make it even better, share more snippets and projects. Help atilim and gorkem improve Gideros itself.

For that, we just need to know what's wrong

strancali

Hi Arturs,

Yes I would only use Gideros, Corona etc for games right now .

Nothing is really wrong because Gorkem, Atilim and the rest of the gang is great! Very friendly and helpful but I'm just speaking in general. More of a "me" and the lack of time to get my first app out (children's interactive app) so I figured I'll use something that is easy to use first, knock it out then come back in a few months. By then, the community should be stronger with more examples and tutorials.

Here is an outline of my game

1) I need to be able to show a video with no controls on it as a "splash screen" and the user can watch the video or tap the screen and get taken to the main menu (check out that app GoGoKiddo)

2) Menu will have the animated storybook and in the end the player can choose from 6 or 7 different games.

3) Need game center, in-app and most importantly iads ready to go (are these available now?)

I know all this can be accomplished but I'm new to lua so it will take time. I dunno what do you think?

Sid

moopf

You're putting game center, in-app purchase and iads in a children's interactive app? That's kind of like the perfect storm of no-nos for an app aimed at children, especially ads.

strancali

hey moopf, no i'm not putting iads but I need to know those 3 are working now. I am putting in-app purchases for sure. You have no idea how much I spend a month on in-app purchases for my kids

Sid

moopf

Ha, oh I think I do (have two of my own)! Glad to hear you're not putting ads in By the way, if you are developing apps for children, you should check out momswithapps.com - it's a community of developers that are creating apps for children. I've been a member for a while, it's a useful place to talk with other developers (and reviewers) in that field.

strancali

nice! I will definitely check it out. Have you seen that app I mentioned "GoGoKiddo"? That's a quality app to me and I want to make quality apps like that, highly recommended.

moopf

Yes, I've seen that. Be warned, the children's app market is tough. I released an app in August last year - http://www.arthurandcharles.com/article.php/17/arthur_and_charles_present_create_and_play - and it's been hard to get any traction on it at all. I will be following it up with an interactive book but I'm reappraising when I'll do that at the moment, as there's another interesting project I have on the boil that might be a better option short-term.

btw, does Gideros not have any built in ability to play video? I hadn't thought about that before but can't see anything obvious in the reference manual.

MikeHart

Hi strancali,

good luck with your C*r*na adventures.

Take care
Michael

strancali

@moopf Yes I know it's hard, I guess all markets are tough so you really have to bring your A game and try to stand out . Your app looks nice but it looks a little busy. What age group are ou targeting for? Regarding the video, I'm sure Gideros can do it but it's just harder for me being new at Lua to figure things out for this deadline. The GoGoKiddo app, they got it right. I think they will climb the charts quickly.

@MikeHart Hey Michael, I'm not going corona (don't think), I'm looking at Stencyl. It's jsut to knock this app out and back to Gideros I go . I thought Stencyl was just another gamesalad but noooooo, it's very powerful. So easy to do and you can code instead of design if you like. Only trouble is it's objective-c but then I can copy any code from the apple library for snippets I need.

strancali

Deleted duplicates

moopf

@strancali It's really aimed at 6-10, rather than pre-school. Interesting that you should say it's busy, not a comment I've ever had made about it before.

Anyway, good luck with your app with whatever development platform you choose.

strancali

Hmmm something is up, cant visit the site from my home but i can from my cell's 3g network.

@moopf. I thought you were targing age group 2-5 that's why i thought it was busy for that age group. Thank you again for the best wishes.

Sid

OZApps

@sid, Stencyl is not just Obj-C, it produces java code too, but you cannot build an iOS app from java source. The Obj-C is a wrapper on the sparrow framework and the main interface is scratch. So... quite a bit. They have done a good job in the development UI.

I always say that a Mac is not better nor inferior to a *nix or Windows, each has it's own importance in the grand schema of things, so whatever works for you.

MikeHart

@MikeHart Hey Michael, I'm not going corona (don't think), I'm looking at Stencyl. It's jsut to knock this app out and back to Gideros I go . I thought Stencyl was just another gamesalad but noooooo, it's very powerful. So easy to do and you can code instead of design if you like. Only trouble is it's objective-c but then I can copy any code from the apple library for snippets I need.

Objective-C.... now that I call a step up. Good luck.

>-

strancali

@MikeHart Actually, objective-c is not hard. I made an app a couple of years back from the tutorial on apple's site. It's very straight forward and the syntax is nearly "english" term wise. The thing I don't like about it is that it takes 100+ lines of code to do something that a different framework can accomplish in 20. This is the whole purpose of Stencyl. It will handle 90% of my needs right out of the box. I set up in-app and iad on a test yesterday in literally 20 minutes and that includes setting a demo account on itunes connect. What I don't understand is how come when corona came out, they had tutorials ready to go and plenty of samples to swoop up the new guys onto their framework. Same thing with Stencyl. They have well documented and plenty of tutorials on how to use their service. I see a lack of that with Gideros and that is why I have decided that I need to use what ever tool is right for me NOW instead of waiting.

@OZApps They did a good job. Version 2.0 is coming out and they are working on html5 and android next. You know, if Gideros can come up with something like Stencyl (it's UI) and how it does most of the heavy lifting, Gideros will be hard to beat. It should be possible right I mean look at corona, they are coming out with a level builder soon too.

Sid

mykyl66

Maybe the fact that the corona folks had a lot more people working for them at the time and when did you get involved with corona? Are you sure you were there at the beginning? I complained and complained about the rubbish documentation when I started with Corona. Most of the gideros framework can be learned by searching for Lua tutorials. There are thousands of sites teaching that side of things.

Look at this link and check out the links section.
http://www.giderosmobile.com/DevCenter/index.php/Main_Page
Or perhaps this page.
http://www.giderosmobile.com/gideros-academy/
or this one.
http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile
and here is an ebook template.
http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/474/e-book-template#Item_4

Its coming and while I agree with you that there is a lack of information for new folks but there is information to find.

Corona have a fairly easy job seeing as they lock out most of the functionality and leave it to the basics. That's why you always hear people asking again and again when is such and such coming. Its not until the competition puts out what folks have been screaming for for a long time that they suddenly put out a certain feature.

Here if your competent enough you can roll your own plugins and add what you need and not wait around until your chosen languages competition adds the feature first.

Oh and you wont be held to ransom over the ability to support your own code here when your license runs out.

Stencyl is good. I looked at it a while back when it was in a select beta. I wouldn't compare it to Gideros or Corona. Its more like an advanced Game Salad.

At the end of that day, use whatever suits the job. When it comes to artwork I use whatever of my apps does the best job quickest for that particular project.

Now I have said what I promised I would never do. I mentioned Corona by name and some of the gripes I had with it. So I better clarify. Corona is very good at creating concepts of games. Gideros is better. Corona lets you create a cool concept in 30 minutes didn't you hear. Gideros can do the same with more control over your physics world as nothing is hidden from you.

Going back to what I said earlier. If a project would be better done in Corona or Stencyl I would do it in Gideros. Joking.

Mike

strancali

@Mike You don't need to sell me on why Gideros is better. You can ask Gorkem how I feel about this place. I'm just saying that I think Stencyl will do what I need right now.

Sid

MikeHart

There is not much to add what Mike has said.

@strancali: I am just shaking my head. You scream for tutorials and yet find Objective-C so easy. Good luck. As I have told you before. You can take 90% of the Corona tutorials and port them over with just a few changes.

Now I have to disagree with you big time. I was with C*r*na since the beginning of 2010. And they were even worse than gideros now. Only small PDF files, a few sample files. No tutorials, no templates. So much for they had the stuff you have mentioned. And how many times I heard that they come out with the next big thing, I can't count them. By now the desktop support should be out by now. Got told this in a personal email from one of their upper guys almost a year ago.

mykyl66

@Mike You don't need to sell me on why Gideros is better. You can ask Gorkem how I feel about this place. I'm just saying that I think Stencyl will do what I need right now.

Sid

I hope you realize that a lot of what I said was tongue in cheek. After re-reading my post it could seem a bit like I was berating you. Unintended I assure you. Just letting out some of my frustrations.

Anyone got tips on letting go of the attitude.

Mike

strancali

Yes, have a nice cold corona . No worries Mike, I'll be back here in no time

moopf

@MikeHart, as long as he sticks with the drag and drop in Stencyl, I doubt @strancali will need to touch Objective-C. Certainly I'm with you - if you can't grasp Lua, I find it difficult to understand how you could grasp Objective-C more easily. I get the feeling that a lot of people, whatever the framework, try to create apps by pinning together examples from elsewhere without really understanding what the code is doing - that's a recipe for disaster in my opinion.

On the whole Corona thing. I trialled it before finding Gideros and it's a disjointed mess. Just look at an example such as sprites not automatically scaling for hd graphics over sd. It screams of a code base that is just not joined up enough, parts of it move quicker than the rest and yet at the same time they answered my questions with a lot of 'we want to do it properly'. How you can have a rendering system, where some of it works well dynamic scaling and image resolution, and the rest doesn't is beyond me. That's not doing things properly at all.

Gideros, whilst it has some things missing that I feel should be in it, at least with what's there it's pretty much all singing from the same hymn sheet

MikeHart

Yes, just use the tool that fits your needs and coding style/abilities the best. And don't hunt for the next best solution as you will do this forever and never get anything done.

strancali

@MikeHart I never said objective-c was easy. I said it's not hard, there's a difference. It means that for me if I want to sit down and learn it I can and I did learn enough to put out my app a couple of years back. I can surely do the same here but here's where it's different. Go to the apple developer website, what do you see? TUTORIALS up the ass. Plenty of codes to learn from. Most people don't like to mess with objective-c because it's time consuming and if you want to go android and the like, you have to learn another platform. That's why Corona, Gideros etc are favored (code once and build many).

I'm a business man first and foremost. Development is something I love to do and games is something that's new to me. I say that because in business, heck in life, everything changes. That's just the nature of it. I'm sure you are upset over what corona promised but they do what's best for them, they have to survive first. Same thing with Gideros. Look at what just happened a few days back. Gideros roles out the paid license and everyone freaked. It wasn't even their intention to make anything different but just add another option. Some of you guys had torches out ready to burn the village down

strancali

@moopf What makes you think I can't grasp Lua?

strancali

Well it's 5am here in Los Angeles so I'm off to bed. I wish you guys all the best.

moopf

@strancali, because there's an absolute ton of tutorials, examples and all sorts on the net covering Lua. Maybe you meant that you couldn't get to grips with Gideros' API for Lua, rather than Lua itself, but that isn't what you said in your first couple of posts. I don't know. Thing is, you'll need to get to grips with an API for Stencyl as well, unless you're just going to use their drag and drop interface or cut and paste examples to make your app which, as I've already said, in my opinion is no way to build a quality app.

I guess I'm still a little confused as to how you can find Objective-C "not hard" but have a problem with Lua. But, in the end, make the decision you feel is best for what you need to do - we all have to make the same decisions for ourselves.

Caroline

Originally I found Objective C hard, but now it's a breeze compared to Lua's metatables . I think it all depends on what experience you've had.

Best of luck with your app, strancali.

moopf

@Caroline, it's a different paradigm for sure. I come from a C, C++ and Objective-C background and yes, whilst it is structured differently (I was having this conversation on this forum yesterday with somebody else), fundamentally the loose structure of Lua makes it a much easier and less intrusive language to learn than Objective-C especially if you're not a developer already.

OZApps

My 2 cents on some of the things above, I started off with development using Spectrum Basic and Z80 Assembly, so things were...different. Saving and loading from Cassettes, limited memory to work with, etc. There were no tutorials that taught how to program in assembly and definitely none that taught to make games in assembly. However there were quite a few books where each author had their own way to deal with sprites and fx.

Fast Forward, worked through a variety of languages and stop at Obj-C, I had worked with C/C++ but I could not just read or understand Obj-C at first. The only thing that actually kept me away was the - and the + in front of the declarations and the square brackets with colons, otherwise it was all C/C++. I tried a couple of times to use xCode (2007 to 2008) and make an app, after all IB was interactive, did not understand the connections business and gave up. That was because I was using Delphi and Visual Basic, they were so much easier to work with than IB and xCode.

In 2009, I had 3 apps on the app store made in Obj-C when I was searching for an alternative framework to develop than using Obj-C that I came across Corona. I did not touch it for a while as I did not want to waste time learning lua and this framework. There was nothing that said how to really start developing, where's all the stuff around it? Like I can in xCode?? I came across Gideros and around September 2011 I mentioned Gideros in a review of all the software that can be used for development of mobile games. My point is that I have watched Corona develop since ti was launched, I have seen Gideros grow since it was launched. In fact I was also one of the first few ß testers for Moai and I have not yet got around to test it properly. The point is that each of these have their limitations and it is not easy to keep up with every new feature that Apple releases, but it would be nice to have that latest functionality in my app.

Corona had the advantage of being the first on the block and they changed the way a lot of developers approach development, largely because of Lua nothing else. A lot of developers do not realise that majority of the questions that they have are not framework specific but Lua specific or worse *shudder* logic related. I will be honest here,In my discussions with Atilim, he has confirmed and assured that the roadmap will include the features soon, in fact there will be a weekly build soon, so the missing features will come soon. Moai is also wonderful, but it is not for the beginner developer, it offers low level API's wrapped in Lua.

As for the other offerings, Corona was trying to ward off GameSalad and get those users, now they are trying to capture the Flash users. The only advantage that they hold is the physical presence - Palo Alto, California. They are still trying to persuade users, however on Gideros, there are a lot of users that are migrating themselves as they feel that they were at the short end with Corona.

At the end of the day, I guess everyone will agree, it is what gets the job done, I mean honestly when I am thirsty, does it matter if I get Avian or Bisleri or Perrier or whatever brand of water? I need water and any is fine. So my decision in choosing a project depends on the client's specifications and insistence on the platform. I could very well love to use Obj-c, but if I can save time and increase productivity, why should I pass on that and not take it up?

If one has an idea, it is about trying that in the new language of choice, that will first give you an idea if you can work with it or not, it will also help you understand if there is adequate documentation for it and then you will also know if there are the API's to do what you want to do. So tutorials are not really essential if you are fishing, but when you are developing with a particular platform, then code snips are very important, so create a library of snippets or patterns instead, they will help you with any language or framework.

Almost seems like an article, must stop...

ar2rsawseen

I think that in 3rd post @strancali stated what was he missing and I doubt anyone (except atilim implementing it all in one evening. Go Atilim! ) can help him with that. So yes, if time is an issue, it's better to use something that already offers fully this functionalities.

No disrespect to anyone