Easy isn't everything. It's considerably more powerful than Gideros as Gideros currently stands. I quite liked working with cocos2d-iphone on my Arthur & Charles app - an app that I still couldn't reproduce in Gideros today, bizarrely, due to lack of features. Never really tried out the cross-platform version of cocos2d, always struck me as a bit of a mess.
I think these days people talk more about cocos2d-x
@moopf: how considerably is cocos2d-iphone more powerful than Gideros? In what important aspects? I haven't really used cocos2d-iphone (just read a bit on its documentation) so I'm very glad that you'll open my mind (and also helps @atilim and @ar2rsawseen)
@phongtt Well, in my case there's a few things that spring out from my app:
1. Clipping. It was an extension class to cocos2d-iphone but it's so easy to make such extensions as you access to the OpenGL layer. 2. Masking. 3. Outputting to a file from a rendered texture. Again it was easy because you can access the data directly, plus I also wrote routines to resize the rendered target so I could output differently sized images of the texture to storage. 4. Sound API includes simple panning. I mean come on, I maintain that this is something that should be in Gideros and the reasons it's not are disingenuous. 5. Native particle system - yay! 6. Even if cocos2d can't do things through its standard facilities, because you have lower level access to OpenGL you can do so much more. I understand that such lower level access is coming in Gideros which will be great.
There's no way that Badlands could be reproduced in Gideros at the moment. It's doing too many neat things with OpenGL that just aren't available to us. Yes Gideros is considerably easier to develop in, it's much less verbose (a problem with Objective-C in general and cocos2d-iphone extensively!) and it's properly cross-platform in a very easy way. But it's pointless pretending that it doesn't have some big limitations.
@ar2rsawseen It's not grumpiness, it's just me being honest.
1. We've made a contract with a commercial sound engine to make it available to every Gideros user. Sound API will be much better with 2.0. (like panning, .ogg support, looping between 2 points, streaming .wav, loading .mp3 to memory, etc.) 2. We'll provide a low level XNA/OpenGL like API to access underling graphics. So that it'll be possible to write a particle engine in pure C/C++ and it'll work unmodified also with non-OpenGL platforms like WP8. 3. Outputting to a file from a rendered texture is easy. I can add it with the next version. 4. I'm still thinking about clipping and masking (is there a difference between them?)
@atilim, it is nice to see new goodies being added, but you might not want to make a habit to throw in features to retain users from switching, that will be a large number of features that might get added
@gorkem No, I came from that to Gideros as cocos2d-x (which was the logical step from cocos2d-iphone) is a mess and I was after something that was cross-platform in a sensible way. There are other cross-platform systems though that can provide much of what cocos2d did, such as Moai for instance.
@atilim On the difference between clipping and masking, this might be inaccurate terminology for two different things I'm thinking of:
1. Clipping I consider to be non-texture based, e.g. being able to describe the bounds outside which a sprite, and any children, are cut off and not rendered. Useful for things such as scrolling areas etc.
2. Masking I consider to be texture based, e.g. rendering a texture and having a mask texture to round corners, for instance.
That's the way I've always thought about the difference between the two but, like I say, my description might not be entirely accurate. They are different beasts but both have a lot of uses.
And to everybody, I never said I was switching. I was just pointing out that Badlands isn't something that could be achieved with Gideros as it currently stands so was probably not a great thing to use when comparing it with cocos2d.
The ONE overriding thing that Gideros has over pretty much every other system is the speed with which development can take place.
You can't compare the gideros player to a system where you have to have your device connected via a wire and then do a complete upload each time you want to fix a bug.
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The ONE overriding thing that Gideros has over pretty much every other system is the speed with which development can take place. ..
I hope me and my brother are about to prove it very soon. Our weekend project took a bit longer than a weekend but its because we decided to extend it to 5 days for the sake of quality. Aftermath Alvin will clean the mess :-)
@ar2rsawseen, the truth is that i really need to take a break from Clouds of Steel to clean up my head and eyes . Same with my brother who was coding very complex sound engine for CoS. And we decided to go for a quick round and see what will come out of it.
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@moopf: how considerably is cocos2d-iphone more powerful than Gideros? In what important aspects?
I haven't really used cocos2d-iphone (just read a bit on its documentation) so I'm very glad that you'll open my mind (and also helps @atilim and @ar2rsawseen
1. Clipping. It was an extension class to cocos2d-iphone but it's so easy to make such extensions as you access to the OpenGL layer.
2. Masking.
3. Outputting to a file from a rendered texture. Again it was easy because you can access the data directly, plus I also wrote routines to resize the rendered target so I could output differently sized images of the texture to storage.
4. Sound API includes simple panning. I mean come on, I maintain that this is something that should be in Gideros and the reasons it's not are disingenuous.
5. Native particle system - yay!
6. Even if cocos2d can't do things through its standard facilities, because you have lower level access to OpenGL you can do so much more. I understand that such lower level access is coming in Gideros which will be great.
There's no way that Badlands could be reproduced in Gideros at the moment. It's doing too many neat things with OpenGL that just aren't available to us. Yes Gideros is considerably easier to develop in, it's much less verbose (a problem with Objective-C in general and cocos2d-iphone extensively!) and it's properly cross-platform in a very easy way. But it's pointless pretending that it doesn't have some big limitations.
@ar2rsawseen It's not grumpiness, it's just me being honest.
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1. We've made a contract with a commercial sound engine to make it available to every Gideros user. Sound API will be much better with 2.0. (like panning, .ogg support, looping between 2 points, streaming .wav, loading .mp3 to memory, etc.)
2. We'll provide a low level XNA/OpenGL like API to access underling graphics. So that it'll be possible to write a particle engine in pure C/C++ and it'll work unmodified also with non-OpenGL platforms like WP8.
3. Outputting to a file from a rendered texture is easy. I can add it with the next version.
4. I'm still thinking about clipping and masking
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1. Clipping I consider to be non-texture based, e.g. being able to describe the bounds outside which a sprite, and any children, are cut off and not rendered. Useful for things such as scrolling areas etc.
2. Masking I consider to be texture based, e.g. rendering a texture and having a mask texture to round corners, for instance.
That's the way I've always thought about the difference between the two but, like I say, my description might not be entirely accurate. They are different beasts but both have a lot of uses.
And to everybody, I never said I was switching. I was just pointing out that Badlands isn't something that could be achieved with Gideros as it currently stands so was probably not a great thing to use when comparing it with cocos2d.
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You can't compare the gideros player to a system where you have to have your device connected via a wire and then do a complete upload each time you want to fix a bug.
Just my $0.02
@Atilim - sounds like interesting times ahead
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#MakeABetterGame! "Never give up, Never NEVER give up!" - Winston Churchill
It simply is faster. Missing quite a features now, but I hope that the redesign of the core will also allow faster turnaround of builds.
Again, interesting times ahead.
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