Corona Labs is closing

plicatibu

Did you guys already knew this?

Maybe Gideros could attract some users from Corona.

Here you can get more details: https://coronalabs.com/blog/2020/02/12/corona-labs-annual-update/

Apollo14

I'm surprised they didn't do it earlier.
Unity murdered many other commercial engines with its blown marketing budget and stupid endless promises.

SinisterSoft

I was thinking that there may be some aspects of the Corona SDK we could merge into Gideros, maybe see if somehow the plugin system could work with ours.

If Corona code could be made compatible and would export in Gideros, then I think a lot would move over, especially since Gideros is faster and has a better version of Lua.

Apollo14

SinisterSoft said:

I was thinking that there may be some aspects of the Corona SDK we could merge into Gideros, maybe see if somehow the plugin system could work with ours.

If Corona code could be made compatible and would export in Gideros, then I think a lot would move over, especially since Gideros is faster and has a better version of Lua.

wow that sounds awesome!!

keszegh

if a good ratio of corona users would switch to gideros, that would be great. if somebody is in their forums, please let them know.

oleg

keszegh said:

if a good ratio of corona users would switch to gideros, that would be great. if somebody is in their forums, please let them know.

The crown will continue to work, they will simply change the financial model ..

plicatibu

This statement

Some of the Corona Labs staff have expressed an interest in continuing to work with Corona as an as-available hobby project, so some engine development will continue.

sounds to me that it won't get too many updates / improvements (at least for some time) and I'm sure many users will have the same feeling.

plicatibu

keszegh said:

if a good ratio of corona users would switch to gideros, that would be great. if somebody is in their forums, please let them know.

I have an account there, but there is an explicit rule in the forum that one cannot promote other forums and tools. If one does this (s)he is asking for a ban.

keszegh

plicatibu said:

keszegh said:

if a good ratio of corona users would switch to gideros, that would be great. if somebody is in their forums, please let them know.

I have an account there, but there is an explicit rule in the forum that one cannot promote other forums and tools. If one does this (s)he is asking for a ban.

perhaps once they are not commercial, they won't mind it anymore.

plicatibu

keszegh said:

plicatibu said:

keszegh said:

if a good ratio of corona users would switch to gideros, that would be great. if somebody is in their forums, please let them know.

I have an account there, but there is an explicit rule in the forum that one cannot promote other forums and tools. If one does this (s)he is asking for a ban.

perhaps once they are not commercial, they won't mind it anymore.

I prefer not to take chances. But if someone starts a thread about alternatives for Corona, I'll talk about Gideros.

antix

Interesting. Corona was the 2nd framework I came across when looking for something to program mobile games with. I didn't find it overly bad to work with but at that time you had to be connected to the internet to compile so I looked for something else and found Gideros.

It seems that Corona going open source will probably attract more users to it IMHO.

SinisterSoft

@antix it will take them a long time to switch to open source, they have to make their build system non-cloud based, switch everything to new servers - then somehow self-fund (as they seem to be saying what they are running it all on now is very expensive). etc...

oleg

antix said:

Interesting. Corona was the 2nd framework I came across when looking for something to program mobile games with. I didn't find it overly bad to work with but at that time you had to be connected to the internet to compile so I looked for something else and found Gideros.

It seems that Corona going open source will probably attract more users to it IMHO.

One of the reasons I switched from crown to Gideros is that the crown can't be compiled offline.
If they open the code - then they will increase their users - at the expense of Gideros & defold

hgy29

If they open source their code, we could consider picking things in there, or even merge gideros and corona into new tool, taking the best of both

plicatibu

SinisterSoft said:

it will take them a long time to switch to open source, they have to make their build system non-cloud based, switch everything to new servers

I think they were working on these items for quite sometime because their updates didn't bring any new feature - just some bug fixes - and they promised it to March 2020.

oleg said:

If they open the code - then they will increase their users - at the expense of Gideros & defold

I parcially agree with you. I don't believe Defold users will migrate to Corona because it has a different working flow. Defold has its editor that is very good and speeds up game development. Thosethat like to use editors won't feel comfortable having to do everything programmatically.

Gideros, on the other hand, has the most similar workings flow.

hgy29 said:

If they open source their code, we could consider picking things in there, or even merge gideros and corona into new tool, taking the best of both

It would be great if a merge were possible. It would not only get best features of each engine but it would also relief the maintainers work because the team would be bigger. That said, I don't believe it will happen due some frictions.

For instance, which framework would change its API to use the other framework's API? Users from framework that started using other set of APIs will have to relearn everything and to port their old games to new APIs.

Take the best features of Corona is more realistic from my point of view.

SinisterSoft

@plicatibu I agree - stripping the best from Corona, with also maybe a conversion 'include' that has commands for the Corona API and diverts them to the Gideros API.

SinisterSoft

Creating the conversion API would be a learning experience, by doing that we would see what Corona has that we don't and this possibly a way to enhance Gideros at the same time.

antix

@Oleg I can;t see amny people leaving Defold because they probably like it's editor-centric workflow. I also can;t see any Gideros users flocking to Corona as it really doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good as Gideros.


When comparing Gideros to Corona, what cool stuff does Corona have that Gideros doesn't?

oleg

antix said:

@Oleg


When comparing Gideros to Corona, what cool stuff does Corona have that Gideros doesn't?

I moved from the crown a long time ago - I'm not aware of their novelties
But when I started:
 - the Crown had a larger community,
- a large team of developers
- better documentation
- there were some api teams that Gideros lacked
- more understandable logic api

But the war started and I didn't have a stable internet and it was easier for me to write offline - and the crown didn't give me that.

plicatibu

Truth be said, documentation of Corona is super b.

hgy29

I had a go at writing an adaptation layer to run corona sources under gideros. It will take time to complete, but it seems to be definitely possible to write such a layer. No changes in original source code should be required.

keszegh

@hgy29, wow. now it just needs to be communicated to corona users somehow. i wonder if their forum is usable for that.

SinisterSoft

A 'corona' plugin!

hgy29

keszegh said:

@hgy29, wow. now it just needs to be communicated to corona users somehow. i wonder if their forum is usable for that.

Better have it somewhat working before communicating

oleg

oleg said:

antix said:

@Oleg


When comparing Gideros to Corona, what cool stuff does Corona have that Gideros doesn't?

I moved from the crown a long time ago - I'm not aware of their novelties
But when I started:
 - the Crown had a larger community,
- a large team of developers
- better documentation
- there were some api teams that Gideros lacked
- more understandable logic api

But the war started and I didn't have a stable internet and it was easier for me to write offline - and the crown didn't give me that.

Forgot to say:
An important advantage of the crown and unity3d is its own stores

Coders can sell prototypes of games to artists
Artists can sell game graphics to coders

keszegh

Corona store will retire too as i understood.

oleg

keszegh said:

Corona store will retire too as i understood.

This means have to think about building your own store

Apollo14

2d assets suck anyways

antix

@Apollo14 generally yeah I have to agree. I'm finding pixel style graphics pretty good because they can be mixed without things looking too different. However, there is always the problem that the creator doesn't want to add more stuff to a pack, even when you offer to pay them... lazy sods

Apollo14

antix said:

@Apollo14 generally yeah I have to agree. I'm finding pixel style graphics pretty good because they can be mixed without things looking too different. However, there is always the problem that the creator doesn't want to add more stuff to a pack, even when you offer to pay them... lazy sods

This is one of the reasons why I became curious about 3D.
One of the benefits of 3D over 2D is that it's easier to work without artist, 3D models are easier to match.
(though if you need something custom - then you're f*cked; custom 3d is expensive as hell
But... 3D requires heavy time investments, there're many mandatory disciplines, each takes weeks or months to learn )

oleg

Apollo14 said:

antix said:

@Apollo14 generally yeah I have to agree. I'm finding pixel style graphics pretty good because they can be mixed without things looking too different. However, there is always the problem that the creator doesn't want to add more stuff to a pack, even when you offer to pay them... lazy sods

This is one of the reasons why I became curious about 3D.
One of the benefits of 3D over 2D is that it's easier to work without artist, 3D models are easier to match.
(though if you need something custom - then you're f*cked; custom 3d is expensive as hell
But... 3D requires heavy time investments, there're many mandatory disciplines, each takes weeks or months to learn )

Partially agree.
All the 2d sprites should now be stylized, and you can't buy graphics from different artists because the styles won't match

But if you have 3D graphics and hand painted textures, you will have the same problems.

But it's easy to fix.\
Studios where many artists work - create restrictions for artists to keep the style of different artists the same:
1. One color palette is created for each set of drawings - artists are not allowed to use different colors
2. For each set, one perspective and perspective and focal length are selected
3. Each set of objects has silhouettes of the same primitive shape (for example, all the details of the drawing are based only on squares and circles and triangles are forbidden)
4. All items in the same set use the same shape of glare

With simple actions, you can turn different styles of objects into one common style, even if drawn by different people.