Hi there
Am trying to make the decision as to whether to jump to Gideros from Corona or just go back to ObjectiveC. I originally used Corona for the cross platform-ness, speed of development etc. and released a decent game.
Am now on my second project and it includes features that we come to expect of the current generation of mobile games: Facebook and twitter integration, using a third-party backend-as-a-service like parse.com, iAd support and it's not going so well in Corona. I am back to writing a lot of code myself so why not just do it in ObjectiveC (thereby losing cross platform :-( ) but having decent support for third-party APIs.
Before giving up on the cross-platform dream I did a quick Google search and found Moai and Gideros. People seem to like both so my questions are:
- How extensible is Gideros - can I get FB, parse.com, iAd, Twitter, IAP support etc without too much work?
- How is the cross platform support?
- Anyone made the switch from Corona to Gideros? If so, why and how did it go? Any regrets?
Many thanks
Mike
Comments
Gideros Studio benefits from plugins, where you can extend the SDK using C, C++, Java or Obj-C. This way you can write your plugin, use one that comes with Gideros Studio, or directly use one of the community contributed plugins. This link contains information about current plugins, samples and tutorials on how to write one: http://giderosmobile.com/DevCenter/index.php/Gideros_plugins
Gideros Studio 2012.2.2 release contains many iOS plugins, and one of them is IAP plugin (see roadmap: http://giderosmobile.com/DevCenter/index.php/Release_notes). You can directly use it in your project.
If you want to extend your application to Android and want to benefit from ads, then this small tutorial will help you implement AdMob in your game: http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile/Gideros-Implementing-AdMob-for-Android
About cross-platform support: OpenGL specific functions (graphics, textures etc), physics, touch events, sound system, hardware (accelerometer, gyro) etc are same on both platforms. Apart from this, each platform has its own plugins (e.g IAP, Storekit etc on iOS and sample plugins on Android). Here iOS has a bit more advantage then Androdi since the plugin support for iOS was released ~1 month ago.
Gideros Studio has a UrLLoader classs which can be used to download data from an URL. It has get, post, put and delete functions (see http://www.giderosmobile.com/documentation/reference_manual.html#UrlLoader). Either use a plugin method, or use UrLLoader to implement your Parse.com client.
iAd is an easy plugin and it's in our roadmap: http://bugs.giderosmobile.com/versions/5
For Facebook and Twitter, you may need to wait a bit. About twitter: Are you willing to use the API that comes with iOS?
My post is a bit messy I know, sorry for that. Took some time to grab links and such.
Likes: avo
As for Gideros and how it measures up to what you are wanting. It is a Lua based framework, so most of your learning is still useful, there will be slight differences between the classes, but still you get more control, look at the Page Turn example done with Gideros, that will give you an idea. For additional functionality that is *yet* not part of the framework, GiderosMobile has opened up for developers to add functionality as plug-ins, though the plug-ins that you write might or might not be cross-platform (depending on what you write for).
Depending on how good you are with Obj-C, you can write your entire app with Obj-C and call it a day or even introduce lua with WAX, or... leverage your lua knowledge and integrate Gideros Studio in your workflow.
The one thing that I like about GiderosStudio is that the devs have opened up the system in a developer friendly manner, while they are adding more features.
Author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development from Apress ( http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 )
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