Corona and Gideros

NunoPT · May 2013

Hi guys, this is my first post and I wasn't sure where to put this question or dilemma . I've already seen on the forum here, many people migrated from Corona to Gideros. So I gave it a try and it seems to me an excellent and stable SDK. One of the things It got me frustrated at Corona was the documentation, tutorials even some books with typos and with code that wasn't working, and today I was reading one of those books and I just got frustrated, and tired, and decided to change! Because it's a waste of time and money...and today when I visited the Gideros website after downloading the sdk, I was directed to this website http://www.giderosmobile.com/gideros-academy/ to get started and get a list of tutorials...but it says "Page not found" , I got frustrated again lol, please guys tell that this page is going to be online or tell me a good source of tutorials that you can recommend. Even at the corona learning page half of them are offline. I can't even afford corona it's too expensive... sorry for the long post ,it may be on the wrong section (sorry about that!) but it was just a bad day...! And nice to meet you Gideros community lol

phongtt · May 2013

Hi and welcome @NunoPT

In the Gideros homepage you'll see the "Resources" menu, which has these excellent links:

http://www.giderosmobile.com/guide
http://docs.giderosmobile.com/
http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/
http://www.giderosmobile.com/tools

phongtt · May 2013

More great resources:

http://howto.oz-apps.com/
http://giderostutorials.com/tutorials/
http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile
http://bluebilby.com/

Platypus · May 2013

Welcome, @NunoPT. It's great to have you here!

@NunoPT makes an important point above. The truth is, since changing to the new website, numerous links have died, which creates a frustrating situation for (both existing- and) new users. However, a gentleman named @Ar2rsawseen is working very hard on improving that situation.

The BEST thing about Gideros, though, is that you can post any question here in the forum, and a friendly expert (probably @Ar2rsawseen) will come to your aid - often with personalised code that you can immediately implement and study.

The sample apps that come with Gideros Studio are good study material too.

What kind of app are you making, @NunoPT?

OZApps · May 2013

@NunoPT,
Welcome, it is interesting since you are the first person that has ever mentioned about the quality of reading material for C*SDK, so which one was it, the eBook or the Packt book with the Chameleon on the cover?

One thing about tutorials that also gets me (and I might be guilty about that too) is that the person writing the tutorial has everything working but when someone reads and tries that, it doesn't work. The most common issue is dependencies on external files (which I avoid in my tutorials now as much as possible).

The other thing is that on C*SDK in it is now a rush for Fame, so tutorials are not about finding a solution, it is mainly about converting some algorithm into Lua specific and in that sometimes things do not work out (as it might depend on specific builds)

Thirdly, now C*SDK is free, this is an indication that they need to retain their fast migrating community. However I can foresee a bigger mess that it can create. In all of that welcome to Gideros, you have made a good choice.

Websites and links die (or are taken down as people move, leave or website upgraded) There are various forums where people post links and then take them off after their questions are answered leaving the next person searching for a similar problem with nothing to go with. @ar2rsawseen the forum should cache the links if possible for future reference.

There is a large number of samples that are now available with Gideros, in fact with the Wax Plug-in from @Bowerandy and the JavaBridge from (I keep forgetting the username) one can add native UI into Gideros, which makes for extended advance tutorials. If you stay on these forums, you would know many of the users that frequent these forums and also learn a bit about their personalities, etc. You will enjoy your stay on these forumss and also learn or share a couple of things.

thanhquan1512 · May 2013

One thing about tutorials that also gets me (and I might be guilty about that too) is that the person writing the tutorial has everything working but when someone reads and tries that, it doesn't work. The most common issue is dependencies on external files (which I avoid in my tutorials now as much as possible).

@NunoPT: welcome aboard

@OZApps:from your experience that means we should avoid using external class (like scenemanager, scoreList..) right? I am afraid that if we do so there will be too many thing to mention about and maybe it will make user seem frustrate & difficult to learn.

I am going to write some tutorials now so thank for sharing your experience, it would be very useful.

NunoPT · May 2013

Wow didn't expect so many replies, different from a different community I know

Such a warm welcome! Thank you!

@phongtt thanks for the links! I'm going to go study them, I really need to get started with this !

@Platypus I didn't know that it was a new website! That explains a lot

I already seen that this community is very friendly and helpful! I want to develop Games for IOS / Android, and if Gideros get's support for windows phone 8 , I think that would be awesome!

@OZApps Yes it was the one with the Chameleon on the cover, and It's full of errata's on Packtpub page, but even the most simple codes that didn't require external files were not working, some of them I figured it out how to solve it, missing things like to call main(), but if your a beginner It's hard to solve this kind of problems, I mean the book is supposed to be for beginners! And not to speak about their support on forums and IRC, and some shameless situations where they blame the customer instead of acknowledge that the problem is from their end.
Yes they are in a rush for fame, but I would love to see Gideros making some marketing, because to discover this SDK I had to dig a lot in google to find it.
And the pricing of corona is a crime, the simulator is buggy, and the rest...well you already know it.

I want to apology all of you for my angry post yesterday but I just got tired, and frustrated, just needed to talk to someone

! I just want to learn and start doing what I love. I'm happy now that i found you guys!

Thanks!

OZApps · May 2013

@OZApps:from your experience that means we should avoid using external class (like scenemanager, scoreList..) right? I am afraid that if we do so there will be too many thing to mention about and maybe it will make user seem frustrate & difficult to learn.

Let me re-iterate.

Some advance demos show things happening seamlessly and the instructions suggest that they need some particular libraries, which are also available in the project, but because these were in a particular directory on the users machine, these instructions do not work very well when run on other machines.

In the case of tutorials, say you want to use tweens, then you will need to have the Tween.lua and the easing.lua files included, so if the tutorial is not about tweening, then this could be avoided and the bit that is the focus of the tutorial could be highlighted or stressed upon. One could argue that it could take away from the wonderful eye-candy, which is a fact, but then you can always write another tutorial on eye-candy

Simpler and smaller blocks are easier to write about and discuss then large portions of code.

OZApps · May 2013

@NunoPT,
I can sympathize with your situation, but I know the issues that go towards writing a book. I know the publishing house, the author and the history behind that book including the direction and the content. I was a tech reviewer on that book and pulled out after the second chapter as I had a conflict of interest as I was writing for another publisher. I was involved as I was supposedly writing a cookbook for those publishers on advanced usage and Alfred from Karnak Games was writing the beginner book. Long story short, it is there.

Though I cannot promise you much in terms of sample code, but if you are interested in Lua and understanding about development and keeping a fluid portable code you could read my book, the details are in the footer/signature.

NunoPT · May 2013

@OZApps I understand that there's a huge process behind the book /publishers /authors and I truly appreciate the efforts that this authors do to help the beginners or advanced users... and I loved the way the book was structured, I wish there was one for Gideros SDK, but when you're learning and even source code provided is not working, and the support / community doesn't help you either, It gets you frustrated, It's just a bunch of factors here that got me mad...

OZApps · May 2013

@NunoPT, have you seen http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1430246626/ref=nosim/apre-20 it has a section on Gideros and one of the Tech reviewers for the book was @Atilim who is the CEO and Chief Developer of Gideros.
Note: This is a a link to the book that I have authored.

Plus if you read through Ar2rsawseen's website appcodingeasy you will find a lot of samples, @Walouk is writing some tutorials, all of which cumulate to a single game/app and then I have two sites http://howto.oz-apps.com and http://LearnLua.oz-apps.com
that have beginner and advanced tutorials. While most of my earlier tutorials were geared towards C*SDK, then towards Gideros, recently most of my tutorials are more Lua based which can be used with any Lua based framework and I do mention ways to adapt code to a specific framework (if required).

Scouser · May 2013

Hi @NunoPT and welcome to the mad fun house

As others have said the website may be missing a few links as it has just recently had a complete overhaul and @ar2rsawseen fixes problems when he is made aware of them.