Did somebody use Defold? :)

SinisterSoft

The html5 stuff looks very compact, I couldn't spot any cheating - maybe @hgy29 could take a look, it could give him some ideas.

Apollo14

Finally I deleted Defold. I don't know, maybe some developers instantly fall in love with their "visual editor", but I didn't. It's such a mess that I prefer what they call "monkey coding", instead of monkey clicking.

I know of at least one other Lua based system that actually doesn't store bytecode on iOS (because normal Lua bytecode isn't universal), instead they encrypt your original source code and store that instead - hoping that their encryption can't be cracked - which it has been btw! I don't know if defold also does this, but I might download a King ipa file and take a look.

Can you please take a look at their ipa when you'll have some free time? It is interesting to know

Apollo14

*deleted duplicate post*

hgy29

Finally I deleted Defold. I don't know, maybe some developers instantly fall in love with their "visual editor", but I didn't. It's such a mess that I prefer what they call "monkey coding", instead of monkey clicking.

I did the same with Unity: spent half a day trying to understand how to code something, and finally gave up. Then I found gideros and sticked to it since then.

antix

@hgy29 I'm sure our entire community appreciate the extreme effort you put into Gideors and are also thankful that Unity sucked so much :bz

oleg

Unity - for large projects, Gideros - for small ones

totebo

All that said I do miss timeline animation in Gideros. I'm happy to use third party software, would love a bit of Spine support.

antix

@totebo The old spine code that is floating about here somewhere works with the latest version of Spine

@oleg, gotta disagree, Gideros can do large projects too

totebo

Yeah, Gideros can do any size project. With its OOP support there is no limit on scope.

Ninjadoodle

I understand why people use Unity for 3d game dev, but I really don't get how and why people use it for 2d only games. You literally have to fight the engine to get anything done.

You can literally code a 2d game in Gideros 10x faster ( that estimate might be open to debate lol ).

Apollo14

Why Gideros did not gain big popularity among mobile developers? What is the actual reason?

oleg

Yeah, Gideros can do any size project. With its OOP support there is no limit on scope.

For a big project, I choose Unity and not Gideros

oleg

Why Gideros did not gain big popularity among mobile developers? What is the actual reason?

because Corona took that niche

antix

Why Gideros did not gain big popularity among mobile developers? What is the actual reason?

I feel that Gideros at the time was a paid for framework and what it offered was (at that time) not the best value point. Corona had a big team behind it and offered more for the money. So Corona got it's huge user base and Gideros did not.

In reality if Corona did not enforce cloud compiling I would have gone with it over Gideros. A big thanks to Corona for being so controlling :bz

john26

@Apollo14 Fake threads, also known as coroutines have an additional use that allows you to write a program "sequentially" like you would have written for the Commodore 64 or DOS PC, ie assuming your program has complete control of the computer. You do not have such control, of coure, but all you have to do is remember to yield every so often.

In normal Gideros programming, you put most of your code in ENTER_FRAME callbacks (listeners). This works well for arcade games (where all the Sprites are moving simultaneously) but you soon get into a mess if you write a card game or turn based strategy game. With coroutines you get to do animations using for loops for example and you can go on to the next animation when the first animation (for loop) ends. That is you can write using sequential programming like you did on old computers.

To put it another way, the ENTER_FRAME events can be thought of as the interior of the main game loop. Every 60th of a second your code is called but you don't get to write the loop itself. With coroutines you can write the outer loop yourself and have multiple such loops which happen sequentially. See here for an example

http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/48666#Comment_48666

see how the animation is done within a for loop and no listeners have been set up. Very different from normal Gideros event-based programming.

Apollo14

I remember dial-up internet... but Commodore64 I didn't use, I'm not that oldschool ) Fake threads are awesome!