New to Gideros but not new to Lua

simwhi · January 2015

Hi all,

I have been coming to this forum for some time but I am not a Gideros developer (at the moment!). I've been using Marmalade for the past 9 months but my latest experience has not been good.

Marmalade have a great SDK for developing 2D games using Lua but the monitisation is very poor and badly documented. In particular the ads implementation does not work as expected, and is based on a webview rather than native apis. This has now stopped our development.

I would like to know about other developers' experience with Gideros. Are there any developers that switched to Gideros from Marmalade?

I have also used Corona for some time but the type of apps we developed (educational) require the use of bit-mapped fonts. If I understand correctly, Gideros has support for this feature too.

I know that Gideros is now open source. Is it still be actively used and maintained?

Many thanks in advance,

Simon

talis · January 2015

Hi @simwhi ,

First of all welcome. I didn't switch from Marmalade as you but when Marmalade launched "Quick" which is using LUA i tried it. It was good when i tried the tutorials. But when i try to do something unique unfortunately there was no documentation and not so much friendly community. Anyway maybe it changed now, maybe not, let's switch back to main topic Gideros.

When Gideros changed to opensource i had so much concerns about the SDK. Will it be maintained, will the community shatter etc etc..
Hopefully so far so good none of my concerns came true. On the contrary the community launched a kickstarter campaign to extend the devices that Gideros runs on. Previously Gideros can export only to Andorid and IOS now by the help of the kickstarter project it will start to publish on Windows/MAC desktop and Windows phone 8 .
(See kikcstarter topic : http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/5399/kickstarter-for-wp8-and-desktop-is-launched#Item_171 )

In addition to those pluses here is really a friendly community. As far as i see everyone try to help each other. To be honest the user base in not enourmous as Corona but helpfull and loyal. So i can easilly say that less people with quality is much more better than a crowd without quality .

Of course these words are written from my point of view.

Again welcome and feel free to ask anything.

keszegh · January 2015

Welcome,
i think Gideros will suite all your needs, but about ads implementation some other people can give you more info.

About active development, enthusiastic people like @ar2rsawseen and others, and also this kickstarter can reassure you:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/207069325/port-gideros-studio-to-windows-phone-8-and-desktop

simwhi · January 2015

Thanks for you replies. From my infrequent visits to this forum, I certainly got the feeling that the community were freindly and helpful.

The kickstarter project looks very promising too.

amin13a · January 2015

Welcome simwhi.

simwhi · January 2015

Is work underway to release a new version of Gideros for 64bit iOS?

talis · January 2015

This is also in process with the kickstarter. Follow this thread please, soon it will be possible.
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/5380/ios-8-64bit-only-form-feb-2015#Item_43

simwhi · January 2015

Talis, This is very useful information.

simwhi · January 2015

We have taken a look at the Gideros API and it looks pretty comprehensive. We were also impressed with the community responses as well as the example code.

We are seriously thinking about porting our app from Marmalade. In the meantime, we are going to do a couple of test projects as our app heavily uses fonts.

I'll keep you posted how we get on.

Many thanks

Simon

SinisterSoft · January 2015

Do the port, you won't regret it.

totebo · January 2015

@simwhi, one thing to bare in mind regards font is to always cache the characters you will use. This preserves CPU in a big way, especially if you update the text frequently.

Niclas

SinisterSoft · January 2015

@totebo - I don't know what you mean by caching the characters that you use. Can you do this? I think I may have missed something. Can you show code to do this as it would be useful.

Edit: Ahh you mean TT fonts, I don't use them - I use bitmap fonts.

If a TT font is used and is cached, is it as fast as a bitmap font?

totebo · January 2015

Yeah, sorry, I meant TTF. Once cached it seems pretty speedy.

SinisterSoft · January 2015

Thanks, I'll take a look.

simwhi · January 2015

We have designed (now doing it again) an interactive English language learning game. We use custom bitmap fonts to engage the user and to highlight specific parts of grammar. This is used to help learners understand more easily. We have more flexibility using bitmap fonts. It would very interesting to try out ttf fonts in the menus, or use them for localisations etc.

Simon

pie · January 2015

As far as I know (I think it was a post from @atlim some time ago) when characters from a ttf are cached, it works as a bitmap font.
The big deal imho is that you don't need to provide @2x bitmap font but it is rendered on the actual screen resolution.

simwhi · January 2015

Hi all,

Just to let everyone know that we are progressing nicely with porting our game to Gideros. A few head scratching moments but no real issues so far. In fact it has all been pretty positive.

We will post again when we get a bit further along.

Cheers,

Simon

simwhi · January 2015

Having used Gideros for just over a week we have found it to be an amazing framework and development environment. We are making steady progress with porting our game.

The community is fantastic too!!

Simon

simwhi · January 2015

OK. We are now two weeks into porting our game. So far, we have had a great experience with Gideros. It's an amazing framework!! We are both looking forward to sharing and contributing to this forum in the near future.

Simon

talis · January 2015

@simwhi happy to hear everything is going fine. And as a gideros fan and a user i want to say my graduate in advance for the future contributions

=D>

simwhi · February 2015

@talis. Thanks. We're about 90% done. I managed to get ads working yesterday without too much difficulty but the documentation/information could be a bit clearer (especailly for newbies).

When things settle down here, I would be more then happy to write some up-to-date tutorials. The Gideros community is great and you can always find answers to questions but it does require a bit of research.

Here are some of the features we have been impressed with:so far:-
1. The apps run pretty much at native speed. We think Gideros is quicker than some other Lua based SDKs.
2. App load time is super quick.
3. The API is pretty straight forward and well organised. If you have come from another SDK is incredibly easy to get into.
4. We like the fact that we can use both bitmap and ttf fonts.
5. The Lua OOP is very clean.
6. Testing over WiFi is fantastic. This alone has really improved our workflow.
7. Exporting Gideros apps to Eclipse proved to be easy. In fact the most time consuming part was the Eclipse and Android SDK installation. I previously used Android Studio but after some research decided to create a clean Eclipsed based environment.
8. Lastly, but by no means last, it's open source. At first we were a bit apprehensive about using open source software but after two weeks we have changed our view completely. We would definitely contribute to any future kickstarter projects. Sorry, we missed the last one!!!

Many thanks,

Simon

simwhi · February 2015

Hi Guys,

Just a quick heads up. We have pretty much finished porting our game. Just testing and tweaking left to do!!

Gideros is a GREAT framework. We are looking forward to the new release.

Cheers

tkhnoman · February 2015

Heck yeaa~
Gideros is GREAT~~

\m/ \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/

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