New to GiderOS

OZApps

John26, maybe not name calling, but the hostility towards Corona is a little much.

not to fuel this silly discussion any further, you have not seen hostility, you need to see the C*SDK forums, try taking this discussion on their forums and mention Gideros. You will see what hostility is

Unknown

Thanks OZApps, i'll check it out.
Appreciate everyone's input on this, really helped make my life easier.

Only have a couple more questions:
1-How many people are currently full time developing the Gideros framework?
2-I see it currently doesn't support Nook or Kindle, or desktop? Are any of these close?
3-Besides the 4 lines listed as roadmap, do we have visibility on whats getting done when in the next few months?
4-Why do you guys think no big studios have used Gideros?

I will share with you all my results (assuming it gets pasted the red tape), at the very least I will get back and let you know how it turns out.

gorkem

@mobidevmark you can check http://builtwithgideros.com for an incomplete list of apps made with Gideros Studio, maintained by Arturs Sossins.

Money raised: Nowhere USD2M, sorry. I know it feels safe with a big company but we are a still small but talented startup doing business for the last 2+ years. I can say, most (if not all) of the support/community work is done by forum members here. Without them, it'd be impossible to come to this point where we are among the best cross-platform mobile application development frameworks.

I haven't seen a complete performance benchmark, other than what Ozapps have provided. What we have "heard" and "seen" is lots (more than 10? 20?) of devs claiming that Gideros Studio can run the same code (slightly / quite / much) faster than Corona SDK. I have yet to see the other way round.

Plus, Gideros Studio has the ability to run native code next to Lua, without any (company-led) restrictions. Have a look at JVBridge and Bowerandy's Wax plugin.

What if we close the doors? I'm pretty much sure one of the options would be to open source the engine, in order not to turn current developers down.

It's up to you, to decide. At least make sure that we are always here and will help you whether you make this switch today, tomorrow or one year later.

Unknown

OZApps, I totally disagree on your comment about hostility on the Corona forums. I've been on there for a couple of weeks and looked at past posts. I see there are a few devs who are rude and I am surprised how the Corona guys deal with them.

The support I got from them was actually really good.

Now, I have also seen some past exchanges with you and Carlos, which I have to agree where crazy. As I said before, seems that Carlos leaving was actually a good thing.

Unknown

Thanks gorkem, appreciate your comment.
Will check out the link, and will be running our own internal test and hopefully I can share the result.

OZApps

#1. ...
#2. Kindle and Nook are supported, in fact every platform that can be available via the Android SDK is supported
#3. This has been discussed on the forums a while ago, those 4 lines are what would be featured in the next build. While I believe @Atilim can chime in on this one.
#4. ...

john26

I can confirm my Gideros game runs fine on the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD (7" and 8.9" versions).

If you are developing for Android, Gideros lets you change Android permissions. Corona does not and this has caused a LOT of controversy in the Corona forums. See, for example

https://developer.coronalabs.com/forum/2012/04/22/default-android-permissions

https://developer.coronalabs.com/forum/2012/07/18/knots-3d-amazon-free-app-day

https://developer.coronalabs.com/forum/2012/07/22/very-disturbing-hidden-network-traffic-corona-sdk-breaks-jellybean

AFAIK this issue has not been resolved.

atilim

Hi @MobiDevMark,

#1 (I misunderstood the question) Currently 1 (the guy with the Santa hat )
#2 As @OZApps said.
#3 If you're talking about the next few months, currently I'm developing encryption of Lua files and Font metrics. Honestly, I'm usually try to avoid talking about roadmap because plans can change.
#4 Although not very big but I find Guava7, Nightspade and Twelve Games as professional game studios.

Unknown

It seems that currently only Atilim is doing the development on Gideros. While it is an amazing achievement, it is a little worrying at the same time.

Great info on the Nook and Kindle, any news on desktop? My last discussions with the
Corona team is that they can provide beta to us by early 2Q 2013.

My last question was purely to see if there have been other studios on this forums asking about Gideros, or maybe the Gideros team can share with us any conversations they've had, would be helpful.

Unknown

Hi Atilim, thanks for the reply, and I must say you've done a great job.

atilim

@MobiDevMark thank you. And about desktop, first we're planning to support windows phone 8 and then desktop.

Desktop support is a little bit tricky: You need to handle full screen and windowed modes correctly (and user should be able to choose it - preferably in game without restarting). And also keyboard and gamepads should be fully supported.

john26

@atilim regarding desktop, it seems to me Gideros devs could get this working ourselves if you would compile libgideros.so for x86 rather than ARM. We can probably work around everything else ourselves... (OpenGL ES is a subset of OpenGL so no problems there I think?)

so, would you mind releasing an x86 libgideros.so (or libgideros.dll) with the a future version?

Nascode

Hi @MobiDevMark

For us, we have evaluated many mobile game engines like Corona, Marmalade, Unity (we still use it for 3d), Sparrow, Air, etc. Even built one native engine ourselves on the past. We are evaluating them by creating a complete game, not only a mere test project.

What made us decide to use Gideros is its on-device testing feature and lua scripting which is extensible using native plugin. These are simply brilliant and able to save us development time.

Aside from that, the community is really friendly. Question asked usually answered fast. Many helpful persons who are willing to help everyone.

And dont worry about @atilim as sole core developer, the quality of his work is simply amazing. Plus looks like Gideros team is on its way looking for additional super dev too.

ar2rsawseen

wow this turned out to be a great discussion. The only thing that's missing is some opinion from @moopf (not only cause of his grumpiness)

moopf

@ar2rsawseen - I'm trying to keep out of it, mainly because the original poster is right - at the moment there's little really concrete that can shout 'Hey, now this is what Gideros can really do'. A lack of really well crafted apps doesn't help, either.

All I can say is that I came to Gideros nearly a year ago now after getting very close to putting my money down on Corona. I liked Corona but it just didn't seem very joined up (if I remember rightly at the time, some things adhered to app scaling, some didn't, for example) which kind of set alarm bells ringing for me. Gideros seemed much more joined up and well put together in that respect. I don't know where Corona is at now but I know that, whilst feature improvement on Gideros slowed down last year, it's an absolute joy to develop with. And that's why I didn't give up on it when new features slowed down, however much I grumped on the forum about it.

I have a game that will be released end of Feb with Gideros and, apart from that, I've used it for a prototype for a client and have started development on a bigger project for another client that will be out middle of the year. Of course, I can't show anything concrete but the game I'll be releasing in Feb is polished, I've spent months tweaking it to ensure that's the case.

The only real benefits I can absolutely highlight as verifiably concrete for @MobiDevMark are:

1. Offline building which allows you to retain control over the finished app packages.
2. The player, which makes iterating and testing on devices fantastically fast. Honestly, this is such a great feature of Gideros.
3. It's joined up. Different parts of the API work together as they should.
4. The ability to write native plugins.

It's always risky going with a platform where the development team is small and that risk is obviously higher if you're a bigger outfit looking to invest in a development system as you potentially have more to lose. But then, even with bigger outfits, things can change so rapidly that your investment might be wasted anyway.

ar2rsawseen

@moopf thats exactly the reason I wanted you in the conversation.

thanhquan1512

So no one mentioned that Corona only support armv7? And the fact that in my android games, Top Install by Device is Samsung Galaxy Y (armv6)

I used to learn Corona but later I choose Gideros because of the above reason, I don't want to lose any customer. And I found that migrating from Corona to Gideros are easy too since both of them use Lua.

With me, although Gideros documentation not as good as Corona but the support community here is fast and always ready to help, that's great.

Unknown

Hi,
First I'd like to thank you all for helping me out, all the info was valuable.

I have been given the green light to share with you the outcome of our evaluation of the different SDKs, but unfortunately not the code we used (I tried).
I am only sharing "our" experience and "our" conclusions, others will no doubt vary.

We evaluated Gideros, Corona SDK Enterprise, and MOAI SDK
The company has decided to standardize on Corona SDK Enterprise.

We broke down our analysis into the following parts, listed by importance:
-Performance
-Corporate stability
-Features current and road map visibility
-Price
-Community

We developed specific code snippets that are relevant to our project to test certain aspect. The test code was on physics, graphical performance, and pure computation.
These were run on actual devices for a couple of days while we measured and logged the data.

The results were very close, with MOAI coming last, and Corona fractionally beating Gideros on most of the test, with some by a bigger margin.

On company stability, we felt that Gideros is still a young, yet a promising company. But its our opinion that its just not ready for prime time. It doesn't have anywhere near the number of games or the endorsement of other top studios as Corona.
We wanted a company that is well funded from a financial and team resource and is displaying the trend that it is moving in the right direction.

Corona's recent announcement of their Corona Cloud was a good indicator for us. They have increased their technical resources and this is obvious by the good progress they are making with their SDK.

Gideros does have some features that are not currently available on Corona. These were not significant enough or didn't pose a big enough obstacle that would make it an issue for us. Also Corona's more visible road map was a critical thing for us.
With Corona Enterprise we can build offline and have the freedom to add native modules as we please.
The dev team didn't particularly like the Gideros IDE, and preferred to use their own.
Corona stood above everyone when it came to documentation and tutorials, this makes a difference for us when it comes to developer ramp up time.

Pricing was a more straight forward point for us. As we anticipate that we will have to go with the Pro package on Gideros, the price difference was about $550/year when compared with Corona SDK Enterprise. Which when put in the overall scheme of things is not very much considering what we get.

Finally, although Gideros has a vibrant and a dedicated community. There were some points which went against it. The lack of dedicated resource to support the community, where Corona has at least 2 full time resources just for community support.


I thought I owe you all a reply, I hope this info has been helpful.

Again, this is our own findings, we wish you all best of luck. I am sure there is a bright future for Gideros with many great things to come.

ar2rsawseen

@MobiDevMark thank you for sharing your comparison.

I was actually shocked to see this: Corona fractionally beating Gideros

As by the statement of many ex-Corona devs, Gideros was running their apps much faster (I think somewhere were mentioned that it was up to 20% faster, as I'm not a corona dev myself, I can't do the comparison).

So is this due to using Corona Enterprise? Or any other factor?

It would also interesting to see the comparison between other frameworks as Unity, for example.

zvardin

Thanks for providing the feedback you did. One thing to keep in mind:

The dev team didn't particularly like the Gideros IDE, and preferred to use their own.

You are able to use other IDEs and still make use of the player. There are some IDEs that are starting to include ways of doing this built in (such as Glider), but you can set your IDE to run the player via commands as discussed here: http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/13035

Unknown

Hi ar2rsawseen, actually we were thinking the same, but we ran the same code on the latest daily build from the standard Corona SDK, and we received the same results.
Running the test on old Corona build did show that Gideros had better numbers.

FYI the performance numbers varied from +5% to +15%.

We might consider Unity in the future for any 3D project, but at the moment, our project is strictly 2D.

Tom2012

Hi MobiDevMark

Paid for both Corona and Gideros. Definitely go with Gideros.

If I had to pick one main reason, it would be this:

I don't see how anyone can develop on Corona as you have to a build on their server before you can test on device.

With Gideros, you connect your device via wifi and your app runs on the device instantly.

This is just invaluable in development.

Just my 2 cents. :-)

Good luck and all the best

Unknown

Thanks Tom2012, but this limitation doesn't apply to us. As I mentioned we opted for the enterprise license which allows off-line build.

Tom2012

Oh well, each to their own. Best of luck to you and the studio.

atilim

@MobiDevMark thank you for sharing your insights. These are valuable information. I also hope the best for you and your studio.

Nascode

@MobiDevMark thank you for your test, could you share your test project here? So we could further improve Gideros' performance? I am quite shocked to know that Moai got worst performance

atilim

@MobiDevMark - btw, your first post's IP and @gameminion's last post's IP are exactly same. Although this proves nothing, I hope you're not the same person or not sitting next to each other.

gorkem

@gameminion since you are now a member of coronalabs, could you please post an explanation for this?

thanhquan1512

@atilim: From your post I notice that there are two new guys in this forum use the term GiderOS (not Gideros )

GameMinion

I hope you are not saying that I wrote this. So I am not sure what you'd like me to explain.
Plus, I would hope you would give me more credit than to know that my IP address is recorded ;-)