Gideros - the good, the bad and the ugly from a newbie point of view

plicatibu

Guys, I discovered about Gideros a couple of days ago and since then I've being reading docs and posts in this forum in order to know it better. I've posted some questions too.

I'm writing now to share my impressions and what worries me.

Please do not take what I am going to say here neither as an attack nor as a destructive criticism.

I have the utmost respect for all of you, Gideros developers and users.

See my comments as the opinion of a newbie that want to help you to grow Gideros community.

Positive points
- Gideros community. I'm impressed to see how amazing you guys are. By reading many posts in this forum and by asking my own questions too I could see how supportive you are.

- Gideros deploys not only to Android and iOS but for HTML5. HTML5 is very important to me, so it's a big plus. And by supporting Facebook instant games is another big plus.

- I saw in a change log of one of Gideros releases that you were making tests with wasm what's great due it be faster than javascript and asm.js (@hgy29 told me in a post that generated code is asm.js so I'm not aure whether it's really wasm os asm.js).

- Gideros development is very active. There are 65 releases sice October 2014. It gives 13 releases per year or almost a new release every month.

- it is really free. I don't have to pay to use it nor I need to load a screen saying it's powered by Gideros.

- I'm able to deploy offline instead of using some cloud services.

- Gideros been multiplatform allows me to work on Windows and on Linux.


Neutral points
- The size of both installer and installed programs. 2GB seems too much when compared to the size of other tools (that range from 25MB to 600MB).
But considering it has the same batteries included philosophy than python that's not a problem.

- I'd very much prefer to use visual studio code for developing because it's the tool I use daily to both my regular work and my personal projects.

- forum is ugly as hell. It could have a better looking. The first time I saw it I thought it was an abandoned project. But as one should not judge a book by its cover, I decided to go on reading it. I'm happy I did it but I belive many would just go away.

Negative points
- its documentation is very bad and insufficient.

Deprecated pages are kept, current pages have links that don't work and sometimes they miss important pieces of information (I'm talking about main page that shows an image that make us think HTML5 is a target platform but its text mention all platforms but HTML5).

- HTML5 games take too much time to load. Even simple ones examples I saw take longer than other games made by other frameworks. The longer it takes to load the greater the chance users will give up playing it.

- There is only one book about Gideros and it is from 2013. It's 6 years old so I expect it is very outdated, what means no book at all in practice.

- lack of good tutorials. And Almost all tutorials I found out on Internet dates from 2012. So in my mind they're pretty useless because they're outdated.

The most recent ones are too basic (with the honorable exception of @MoKaLux's tutorials. By the way they're not listed in Video Tutorials page).

As a newbie I expect (and need) many complete tutorials from classic games (tetris, snake, minesweeper, angry birds, flappy bird, asteroids, and so on).

IMHO that's the worst problem to adopt Gideros.

For instance, for Corona I found almost 100 tutorials in a single search on Google. There is another 2D framework that I know that has more than 700 tutorials and more than 10 books available.

It seems Gideros community is tiny. Really tiny (a guess of mine is that it's less than 100 active users).

That explains why there's so little tutorials. But this becomes a vicious cycle. There aren't many tutorials because there are so few Gideros users. And as there are few users there are not many tutorials.

I'm not sure the current state of adMob and in-app purchase for both Android and iOS but considering how active is Gideros development, I bet it is always up-to-date with changes in Google, iOS and AdMob services.

After all, I will invest 2 weeks studying Gideros to see how comfortable I'll be using it.

Regards.

oleg

@plicatibu You can access wikipedia at @SinisterSoft, and improve documentation and examples.

SinisterSoft

@plicatibu yes - we are steadily improving the docs, but any help would be much appreciated. If you need access then let me know and I'll add you.

oleg

plicatibu said:

For instance, for Corona I found almost 100 tutorials in a single search on Google. There is another 2D framework that I know that has more than 700 tutorials and more than 10 books available.

You can use Corona guides to create gideros games

plicatibu

@SinisterSoft I may edit the documentation to remove broken links and add missing information. For tutorials and examples I can't at the moment because I don't know how to use Gideros API.

@oleg Are both APIs so similar that one can use samples from Corona to develop in Gideros? It would be nice.

keszegh

thanks for your insights.
i think the wiki has actually a lot of useful info for beginners and otherwise. reference, tutorials, etc.
the main page should be indeed streamlined, e.g. i don't think the old reference guide is uptodate but it is still linked instead of the wiki e.g. here:
http://giderosmobile.com/guide

plicatibu

@keszegh Thank you for sharing the link.

@oleg already shared it with me in another post I made. And There I pointed out that it has some problems too.

Regards.

oleg

plicatibu said:

@keszegh Thank you for sharing the link.

@oleg already shared it with me in another post I made. And There I pointed out that it has some problems too.

Regards.

Just look now at the very top of the forum, there first line is all links to useful information.

MoKaLux

@plicatibu thank you very much for your honest feedback.
I adopted gideros over other engines for various reasons:
- I can write in arabic in my apps
- the apk is very small compared to other engines
- admob is very easy to implement (it's not the latest version but it works as it should)
- you have access to the file system using gmedia plugin (not so much for html5)
- ... and a lot lot more

For the tutorials I cannot agree more. I discovered that here the way to go is to use already written code and adapt it to your needs.
Or as @oleg mentionned you can use other lua tutorials For example I used a lot of love2d tutorials to understand how cbump worked in gideros! The same for box2d (liquidfun) I watched libgdx tuts and adapted them to gideros!

Doing all this I discovered that you could pretty do anything in gideros studio!
The keys are patience and endurance

Finally I would love to do more gideros tutorials but I am afraid my english is terrible!!! That prevents me from doing more. I'd prefer do french tutorials!

Peace

MoKaLux

+ have you seen those?
angry bird, fruit ninja, ...:
https://github.com/gideros/gideros/tree/master/samplecode-bleedingedge


+ very old code (2011) still work in latest gideros version! that only happens here in gideros

oleg

MoKaLux said:

@plicatibu thank you very much for your honest feedback.
I adopted gideros over other engines for various reasons:
- I can write in arabic in my apps
- the apk is very small compared to other engines
- admob is very easy to implement (it's not the latest version but it works as it should)
- you have access to the file system using gmedia plugin (not so much for html5)
- ... and a lot lot more

I started with the Corona SDK, then I reworked all the games in Gideros. -
The games got smaller in size, the first week after I posted the game update I made money on it and bought a paid version of Gideros.

antix

@plicatibu You hit the nail on the head about documentation and tutorial. I've spoken about those subjects before but nothing really much changed. The actual website is a bit of a shambles in my opinion also. I created a new site but there wasn't any interest in my vision so I just deleted it all.

If you can get past the negatives you will find that Gideros is really fantastic! It's faster than any other 2D engine that uses Lua (IMHO) and it is very easy to use and learn.

oleg

MoKaLux said:

+ have you seen those?
angry bird, fruit ninja, ...:
https://github.com/gideros/gideros/tree/master/samplecode-bleedingedge


+ very old code (2011) still work in latest gideros version! that only happens here in gideros

Also a lot of useful things can be found in this section of the forum.
http://forum.giderosmobile.com/categories/code-snippets

plicatibu

@MoKaLux I didn't know about them. Thanks for pointing them to me. Also it is very nice to know that so old code still works with the new versions of Gideros.

@oleg For sure I'll take a look at the link you provided. Thanks.


@antix I'll dedicate at least 2 weeks studying Gideros. My studying plan is:

- watch all @MoKaLux's videos.
- study all examples posted by
@MoKaLux.
- study tutorial A Simple Box2D Game made by @hotbuttered
- watch John Blackburn videos.
- then I'll try to convert 3 corona tutorials to Gideros.

I believe that after that I'll have a good understanding of Gideros.

Apollo14

Hi @plicatibu !
You can check my 'Newcomers roadmap' too
http://blog.giderosmobile.com/2018/08/newcomers-roadmap-from-where-to-start.html

hgy29

I can't agree more wih everything you said @plicatibu, we all try to make Gideros more attractive but we are so few... docs aren't my cup of tea I am afraid, and I dedicate already too much time to Gideros. More time than I'd like and much more than I should on my paid job time.
But I try my best to keep it technically to the top, and every kind of help is much appreciated, by me and the whole gideros community.

plicatibu

@Apollo14 Very nice docs. I'm going to add them to my list of thinks to study. Thank you.

@hgy29 Everyone can see how good Gideros is. Thank you for your efforts in making it better and better.

Regards.