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Gideros - the good, the bad and the ugly from a newbie point of view — Gideros Forum

Gideros - the good, the bad and the ugly from a newbie point of view

plicatibuplicatibu Member
edited November 2019 in General questions
Guys, I discovered about Gideros a couple of days ago and since then I've being reading docs and posts in this forum in order to know it better. I've posted some questions too.

I'm writing now to share my impressions and what worries me.

Please do not take what I am going to say here neither as an attack nor as a destructive criticism.

I have the utmost respect for all of you, Gideros developers and users.

See my comments as the opinion of a newbie that want to help you to grow Gideros community.

Positive points
- Gideros community. I'm impressed to see how amazing you guys are. By reading many posts in this forum and by asking my own questions too I could see how supportive you are.

- Gideros deploys not only to Android and iOS but for HTML5. HTML5 is very important to me, so it's a big plus. And by supporting Facebook instant games is another big plus.

- I saw in a change log of one of Gideros releases that you were making tests with wasm what's great due it be faster than javascript and asm.js (@hgy29 told me in a post that generated code is asm.js so I'm not aure whether it's really wasm os asm.js).

- Gideros development is very active. There are 65 releases sice October 2014. It gives 13 releases per year or almost a new release every month.

- it is really free. I don't have to pay to use it nor I need to load a screen saying it's powered by Gideros.

- I'm able to deploy offline instead of using some cloud services.

- Gideros been multiplatform allows me to work on Windows and on Linux.


Neutral points
- The size of both installer and installed programs. 2GB seems too much when compared to the size of other tools (that range from 25MB to 600MB).
But considering it has the same batteries included philosophy than python that's not a problem.

- I'd very much prefer to use visual studio code for developing because it's the tool I use daily to both my regular work and my personal projects.

- forum is ugly as hell. It could have a better looking. The first time I saw it I thought it was an abandoned project. But as one should not judge a book by its cover, I decided to go on reading it. I'm happy I did it but I belive many would just go away.

Negative points
- its documentation is very bad and insufficient.

Deprecated pages are kept, current pages have links that don't work and sometimes they miss important pieces of information (I'm talking about main page that shows an image that make us think HTML5 is a target platform but its text mention all platforms but HTML5).

- HTML5 games take too much time to load. Even simple ones examples I saw take longer than other games made by other frameworks. The longer it takes to load the greater the chance users will give up playing it.

- There is only one book about Gideros and it is from 2013. It's 6 years old so I expect it is very outdated, what means no book at all in practice.

- lack of good tutorials. And Almost all tutorials I found out on Internet dates from 2012. So in my mind they're pretty useless because they're outdated.

The most recent ones are too basic (with the honorable exception of @MoKaLux's tutorials. By the way they're not listed in Video Tutorials page).

As a newbie I expect (and need) many complete tutorials from classic games (tetris, snake, minesweeper, angry birds, flappy bird, asteroids, and so on).

IMHO that's the worst problem to adopt Gideros.

For instance, for Corona I found almost 100 tutorials in a single search on Google. There is another 2D framework that I know that has more than 700 tutorials and more than 10 books available.

It seems Gideros community is tiny. Really tiny (a guess of mine is that it's less than 100 active users).

That explains why there's so little tutorials. But this becomes a vicious cycle. There aren't many tutorials because there are so few Gideros users. And as there are few users there are not many tutorials.

I'm not sure the current state of adMob and in-app purchase for both Android and iOS but considering how active is Gideros development, I bet it is always up-to-date with changes in Google, iOS and AdMob services.

After all, I will invest 2 weeks studying Gideros to see how comfortable I'll be using it.

Regards.

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