I am new in cocos2d development. I developed some stuff on andengine on Android and I know C++ language. Now I want to rewrite some stuff from andengine and make it available to iOS as well. I am reading and reading and testing from couple of days, everything is just ok, but few days ago I explored Lua. I adopted language semantics, wrote some scripts and realized that in Internet there is a lot of usage of this language. It is so common that I cannot believe that I know about it from couple of days. So I thought that would be nice if I try to use it. I have only few questions for now.
Can I load some Lua scripts and use it in my cocos2d-x game (written in C++)?
What is the difference between cocos2d-x 2.x and new 3.x beta branch (about Lua treating off course)?
I think about Lua only as way to implement AI for now (is this so good idea or not necessary?). I think it could be good idea because it is portable and I can use very the same AI algorithms for different platform (andorid, iOs, windows, linux, web...).
Please just give me some light about usage of Lua in cocos2d-x, because I cannot find any sense tutorials. If there is something the headers are bad, or version is deprecated or something else which is really annoying when you have no clue how to use it.
Maybe better is to write entire project in lua?
In short:
Yes.
What do you mean?
It works.
As LearnCocos2D suggested, they cover too much and are not good questions. I suppose you're wondering if you would like to use cocos2d or cocos2d with lua. I suggest you take a look at quick-cocos2d-x, because you mentioned cross-platform AI and it worths to have a look.
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I've worked for some time with Unity3d and found it's 2D part with OnGUI() or GUITextures too clumsy. Also, even a smallest game done on Unity3d is at least 10MB download which is just too much for a 2D game.
So, I'm currently looking for an engine for 2D. I've tried Cocos2D but it's iOS only and I wouldn't like to rewrite everything into another language for Android (so, e.g. Java port of Cocos2d for Android is not an option). Instead, I want to write the code once and with least hassle deploy it on iOS, Android and possibly Windows Phone 7. I have both Mac and Windows.
Just to be more detailed, here are my requirements to the engine:
must be cross-platform
must be efficient
should be C++, Java, C# or Objective C since I'm comfortable with them and NOT Flash, Javascript, HTML5 since I am not a web developer
must have a large community, tutorials, additional libraries which cover most of the stuff you'd have when developing on iOS or Android directly (in-app billing, facebook etc.)
the final delivered package must be not too large
the engine can be free, but I also wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price
I've found the following engines:
Marmalade (and IwGame engine on top of it) - C++, found overall very positive reviews of Marmalade but not sure about IwGame. EDIT (March 2013): Looks like Marmalade SDK now includes Cocos2Dx and some in-built IDE which makes it much better (and costs $150 per year for indie dev which is ok with me).
Corona SDK - Lua (efficiency doubtful), also needs internet connection to compile code
Cocos2d-x - C++, received lots of reviews from developers, mostly positive and many think it's best for 2D
Particle code - Java+Eclipse, found no reviews or comments
Moai - Lua, coudn't find any reviews/opinions on it
Monkey engine - seems to have too few features
Haxenme - it's Flash, I've never used it and don't want to
use Unity3d but with 2D packages like 2D Toolkit
ports of SDL to Android (also here) and iOS - doesn't look to have much support or current development (?)
GLBasic - Basic language, I don't like it
playN - seems to be early in development (?)
Gamvas - HTML5, doesn't look like a mature engine to me
Ignifuga - Python, also doesn't look mature
ORX - not sure if it's still developed (?)
Construct 2 - reminds GameMaker, might be ok for rapid prototypes but definitely not for industry-level games
XNA and then port the game using ExEn (would need Mono Touch to port to iOS and Mono for Android to port to Android) - C#, and is probably more thought for folks coming from Microsoft products like xBox (I come from Android). Also, those Mono tools cost $800 in total for small developers
Impact - JavaScript, uses HTML5. I'm not much into JavaScript (e.g. preferred C# on Unity3d), also not sure about efficiency since it runs in the browser (?)
GameMaker - own scripting language GML and I actually remember this one as a tool for non-programmers. Has it actually grown into a real engine, I mean for serious development?
AppGameKit - C++, yet seems to be still pretty new. Haven't found any reviews on it
use Cocos2D and Objective C to develop for iOS only and then make an APK for Android out of it using Stella SDK. Has anyone done this? I'm pretty sure there will be limitations, and how about Google's in-app billing, AdMob and Facebook integration on Android?
Moscrif - JavaScript, looks like it's more for former web-developers
Starling - Flash 11, i'm not much into Flash
ND2D - not yet 1.0, does it have many features?
So, I'd be happy if you could comment from your experiences with the engines and suggest which one in the list (or anything else that I've missed) is the best for the described requirements. I also may be wrong with my first impressions about some of the engines.
I'm currently thinking of Marmalade+IwGame as the best option but since I don't have much info about Cocos2d-x and Particle code, I am not really sure about it.
Thank you!
EDIT (June 2013): So far I made 2 cross-platform 2D games and used Unity3D with 2D Toolkit plugin for both. For the game with simple GUI I used a simple self-made GUI system based on Unity's own. For more complex one (e.g. where GUI elements can overlap) I used the NGUI plugin. Recently 2D Toolkit added some more classes for GUI which is very handy since one had to use 2 different systems for texture atlases when combining NGUI with 2D Toolkit. I'll definitely try that one in the next 2D game. The main reason for choosing Unity3D for 2D games was that I already was deep into Unity3D both in terms of experience and accumulated code snippets for re-use. Also, I purchased Unity3D pro (with Android Pro and iOS Pro) for 3D games and it made full sense to just pay additional $60 for the 2D Toolkit to get 2D games also covered. I so far don't regret my decision, it seems to have been optimal for my case. The only thing which gave me headache was adding social features with the Prime31's plugins (Android & iOS social plugins) but I assume that their bugs are not the fault of Prime31 but of Twitter/Facebook instead, so I probably would see the same bugs on any other engine or plugin.
EDIT (Jan 2014): I guess with Unity 4.3 the answer to my question is pretty obvious now: the Unity's new sprites system and maybe also 2DToolkit totally beat anything else, especially for people who have (like me) been on Unity for a while and purchased the Pro version with add-ons.
LibGDX is one of the best engines I've ever used, works on almost all platforms, and performs twice as fast as cocos2d-x in most tests I've done. You can use any JVM language you like. Here's a 13 part tutorial in Java, and here's a bunch using jruby. There's a good skeletal animation tool that works with it here, and it has baked in support for tiled TMX maps as well. The ui framework is awesome, and it has a scene graph and actor style API similar to cocos2d scenes, sprites and actions. The community is awesome, updates are frequent, and the documentation is good. Don't let the java part scare you, it's fast, and you can use jruby or scala or whatever you like. I highly recommend it for 2d or 3d work, it supports both.
I've worked with Marmalade and I found it satisfying. Although it's not free and the developer community is also not large enough, but still you can handle most of the task using it's tutorials. (I'll write my tutorials once I got some times too).
IwGame is a good engine, developed by one of the Marmalade user. It's good for a basic game, but if you are looking for some serious advanced gaming stuff, you can also use Cocos2D-x with Marmalade. I've never used Cocos2D-x, but there's an Extension on Marmalade's Github.
Another good thing about Marmalade is it's EDK (Extension Development Kit), which lets you make an extension for whatever functionality you need which is available in native code, but not in Marmalade. I've used it to develop my own Customized Admob extension and a Facebook extension too.
Edit:
Marmalade now has it's own RAD(Rapid Application Development) tool just for 2D development, named as Marmalade Quick. Although the coding will be in Lua not in C++, but since it's built on top of C++ Marmalade, you can easily include a C++ library, and all other EDK extensions. Also the Cocos-2Dx and Box2D extensions are preincluded in the Quick. They recently launched it's Release version (It was in beta for 3-4 months). I think we you're really looking for only 2D development, you should give it a try.
Update:
Unity3D recently launched support for 2D games, which seems better than any other 2D game engine, due to it's GUI and Editor. Physics, sprite etc support is inbuilt. You can have a look on it.
Update 2
Marmalade is going to discontinue their SDK in favor of their in-house game production soon. So it won't be a wise decision to rely on that.
You mention Haxe/NME but you seem to instinctively dislike it. However, my experience with it has been very positive. Sure, the API is a reimplementation of the Flash API, but you're not limited to targeting Flash, you can also compile to HTML5 or native Windows, Mac, iOS and Android apps. Haxe is a pleasant, modern language similar to Java or C#.
If you're interested, I've written a bit about my experience using Haxe/NME: link
V-Play (v-play.net) is a cross-platform game engine based on Qt/QML with many useful V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more. API reference
The engine core is written in native C++, combined with the custom renderer, the games reach a solid performance of 60fps across all devices.
V-Play also comes with ready-to-use game templates for the most successful game genres like tower defense, platform games or puzzle games.
If you are curious about games made with V-Play, here is a quick selection of them:
Squaby: a tower defense game
Chicken Outbreak: a platformer like Doodle Jump
Blockoban: puzzle game
Crazy Elephant: a game similar to Angry Birds
Snowball Mania: multiplayer action game
Blitzkopf: brain game
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the guys behind V-Play)
Here is just a reply from Richard Pickup on LinkedIn to a similar question of mine:
I've used cocos 2dx marmalade and unity on both iOS and android. For
2d games cocos2dx is the way to go every time. Unity is just too much
overkill for 2d games and as already stated marmalade is just a thin
abstraction layer not really a game engine. You can even run cocos2d
on top of marmalade. My approach would be to use cocos2dx on iOS and
android then in future run cocosd2dx code on top of marmalade as an
easy way to port to bb10 and win phone 7
I find a nice and tidy Wave game engine few days ago. It uses C# and have Windows Phone and Windows Store converters as well which makes it a great replacement of XNA for me
and what about LibGDX from BadLogicGames?
Check out Loom (http://theengine.co) is a new cross platform 2D game engine featuring hot swapping code & assets on devices. This means that you can work in Photoshop on your assets, you can update your code, modify the UI of your app/game and then see the changes on your device(s) while the app is running.
Thinking to the other cross platform game engines I’ve heard of or even played with, the Loom Game Engine is by far the best in my oppinion with lots of great features. Most of the other similar game engines (Corona SDK, MOAI SDK, Gideros Mobile) are Lua based (with an odd syntax, at least for me). The Loom Game Engine uses LoomScripts, a scripting language inspired from ActionScript 3, with a couple of features borrowed from C#. If you ever developed in ActionScript 3, C# or Java, LoomScript will look familiar to you (and I’m more comfortable with this syntax than with Lua’s syntax).
The 1 year license for the Loom Game Engine costs $500, and I think it’s an affordable price for any indie game developer. Couple of weeks ago the offered a 1 year license for free too. After the license expires, you can still use Loom to create and deploy your own games, but you won’t get any further updates. The creators of Loom are very confident and they promised to constantly improve their baby making it worthwile to purchase another license.
Without further ado, here are Loom’s great features:
Cross platform (iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux/Ubuntu)
Rails-inspired workflow lets you spend your time working with your game (one command to create a new project, and another command to run it)
Fast compiler
Live code and assets editing
Possibility to integrate third party libraries
Uses Cocos2DX for rendering
XML, JSON support
LML (markup language) and CSS for styling UI elements
UI library
Dependency injection
Unit test framework
Chipmunk physics
Seeing your changes live makes multidevice development easy
Small download size
Built for teams
You can find more videos about Loom here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LoomEngine?feature=watch
Check out this 4 part in-depth tutorial too: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2013/02/28/A-closer-look-at-the-Loom-game-engine-Part-one-getting-started.aspx
I've tried AppGameKit, It's both c++ and Basic.
It's very easy to code 2d games in the Basic varient, with physics, collision and heaps more.
It's also in active development, and really cheap (65$).
The main problem is that it's really hard to compile for Android (you need to download heaps of files and follow difficult guides and things like that)
My opinion is that it isn't yet good enough for commercial use, but is good for indie programmers
It's got a medium size community
I currently use Corona for business applications with great success. As far as games go, I'm under the impression that it doesn't provide the performance that some of the other cross-platform development engines do. It is worth noting that Carlos (founder of Ansca Mobile/Corona SDK) has started another company on a competing engine; Lanica Platino Engine for Appcelerator Titanium. While I haven't worked with this personally, it does look promising. Keep in mind, however, that it comes with a $999/yr price tag.
All that said, I have been researching Moai for a little while now (since I am already familiar with Lua syntax) and it does seem promising. The fact that it can compile for multiple platforms, not limited to mobile environments, is appealing.
Multimedia Fusion 2 is also a worth contender, considering the complexity of games produced and the performance realized from them. Vincere Totus Astrum (http://gamesare.com) comes to mind.
Recently I used an AS3 engine: PushButton (now is dead, but it's still functional and you could use something else) to do this job. To make it works with Android and iOS, the project was compiled in AIR for both platforms and everything worked with no performance damage. Since Flash Builder is kinda expensive ($249), you could use FlashDevelop (there is some tutorials to compile in AIR with it).
Flash could be an option since is very easy to learn.
I have game (of cards based on Contract Bridge) written in Qt (QML) for KDE, now I'm supposed to port the entire game to Android (with Android apapted UI of course). At first I considered to use Necessitas (a Qt port for Android) but found that it is still under development and is currently in 3rd Alpha. I'm new to Android development (as well as game development), while I have experience working in Java, C++ and web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript.
Hence based on my skills, I considered using MoSync. But I'm not sure if I'll be able to use any existing modules of game already developed in Qt (while in MoSync its possible to invoke C++ code from JavaScript and vice-versa), and since I didn't worked on the Qt version of the game, I'll first have to refer to that code and then I'll be working on Android version of the same. So I need suggestion that from where should I start. Also, I have 1.5 months of duration to complete the project (without any working hour constraints), so also suggest me if its a good idea to work from scratch using Android APIs.
Please let me know if I need to elaborate the question even further.
Thanks.
I recommend taking a look at V-Play (v-play.net). It's a cross platform game engine based on Qt/QML .
If your game is already written in QML, you have the least porting effort because you can use almost all of your existing code, and use V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more (API reference).
You can also take a look at Benefits to find out if V-Play satisfies your demands.
Qt is more cross-platform than ever now. instead of porting, just modify it a little and continue with Qt, then compile for iOS, Android, etc.
As the topic states - is there any technology that would let me write code for a simple commercial 2D game which could be then compiled to work well on Android, iOS and Web browsers or at least two of them (e.g. Android and iOS)? There is so much buzz about cross-platform nowadays that I was wondering if I'm missing something.
My goal (set by my producer) is to make this game for all of these three platforms, and so far I planned to use:
- Web browsers: Adobe Flex,
- Android phones: Java (since my favourite C++ is recommended only for short snippets),
- iPad/iPhone/iPod: Objective-C (are there any alternatives?).
It pretty much means re-writing the same source code three times. Is there any way to speed it up by using a technology that would work on at least both of them?
However, I don't want to use Adobe Flex for all three (though it's possible), because it requires Adobe AIR (works only with Android 2.2 and higher) and not a lot of phones have it (it's totally different with browsers where 98% of people have Flash).
I don't mind adding some platform-specific code for each version, of course.
Also, if you have any suggestions about choosing a fancier technology for any of the platforms (maybe some nice frameworks?), I'd really appreciate that, too.
Take a look at Corona and Moai both are Lua-based frameworks for game development targeting multiple platforms.
I would like to say that Multimedia Fusion was capable of doing this, but it isn't quite ready yet. There are currently a number of runtime exporters for the product which allow you to export your game to multiple target platforms which include flash, java and iOS at the moment. XNA and Android exporters are currently in the works. I should probably mention that I am only affiliated with these guys as a happy consumer of their products. It is probably worth checking it out even if they can't do everything you want yet. If it's not suitable for your needs it is still a very good choice if you wish to rapidly prototype your application.
See:
http://www.clickteam.com
On a side note, personally I would recommend against going down the js+html5 route, particularly if you are targeting mobiles. I should probably stress that it's simply an opinion I have and that there are plenty of people here who will disagree with me. In all javascript games I have played, I have felt the garbage collector. The issue is that without control over garbage collection it is free to run when it feels like, causing infrequent but very obvious pauses in the middle of your game. You can work around this but I don't see why it should be that difficult. I can definitely align with the ideals of being able to write the thing once and run it on all platforms, but I can't see it working just yet.
To offer some advice assuming you find no suitable tools for the job, your aim is to maximise reusability. This means all of your games resources and levels should be well defined as independent resources. For non-critical logic you can make use of embeddable scripting languages such as Lua, which will maximise your code reuse. C (or C++) code will also be reusable on a lot of platforms, and might be a good choice if you are familiar and confident with the language.
I'm personally using Phonegap and Zepto.js. But you may have more luck with jQuery mobile. Phonegap is nice because its website will compile the apps for you.
1) If you write your game in C++ you can use it for iPhone & Android (NDK) as well. Preferably, you write your game engine in C++, than you can use a OS specific layer for UI stuff..
2) Implement your game in HTML & Javascript. iPhone/Android users will have to use a webbrowser to play your game. For iPhone, you can even create a launcher, that looks like an app, but actually is a webview with HTML & Javascript
Unity3D should be able to do this for you, if you purchase some extra sprite addins to handle 2D (like Ex2D or SM2 or Toolkit 2D). Also right now until Apr 8, the iOS and Android license is free.
Game Maker Studio. It has a package that let's you deploy on all of the platforms you outlined.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio
I am an experienced professional programmer who wants to delve into Android programming. I also wish to investigate cross-platform programming using tools like PhoneGap or Titanium.
However, I am a bit in doubt of which learning strategy is best.
One approach is to get a good feeling of the Android environment and later on explore the possibilities of the cross-platform tools.
Another approach is to jump start using say Titanium (which to me looks like the better option of the two mentioned) and then after a while look into the underlying Android building blocks. The reason why this approach seems worth considering is that although I have earned my living on programming for 20 years, I have no experience whatsoever with Java. And the feeling of getting something done has always been encouraging to me.
What do you think? Does option 2 make sense, or would it be more sensible to get an understanding of the Android environment first?
Thanks in advance,
Martin
I think that all depends on what will you develop:
If you want to develop simple interfaces (parsing XML/Json/...) with some forms and nice transitional effects, then Titanium is yours.
However, the most advanced functionalities aim the iOS platform. For example, the augmented reality module or the push notification are not supported for Android.
On the other hand, if you want to develop advanced interfaces (Games for example), then you have no choice: Android SDK is the best way (you can use Flash for Android but it doesn't support very first Android OS versions).
In all cases, you have to understand how the Android platform works.
I had a similar decision to make, although I am not an experienced programmer like you with vast experience , I had no java knowledge and I needed to write an android app for a project in grad school ,and i'd tend to agree with you on which is the better option , although reading the dev guide and grasping the basics will be a must. And like Zakaria says , it also depends on what you plan to develop.
in my case I learnt basic java first , then used the SDK for my project. Its not that big a learning curve actually , I did not find too many problems with the API.