Bye Corona and welcome Processing?!

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Whitesky Games

Hi folks,

the last 3-4 months I am testing the Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile to develop  for the IPhone and the Android. While the idea of Corona is awesome by using the lua language to develop your apps, the product itself is lacking quite a few features that makes developing serious apps very difficult. The advantage of the easy to use language is lost by working around missing features and bugs.

At least bugs are fixable but to me Ansca Mobile doesn’t show much effort put into this. You rather see twitter posts about them traveling around the world than… “hey I fixed this or that.”.  I have some other issues with how they deal with customer support and their product issues, but let’s stop the whinning and go over to something very interesting.

While following a link on the blitzbasic forum I discovered the processing language. It seems to me that it uses some kind of java dialect. Later on I found out that you can develop for the iphone with it and also that there is support for the android platform. Everything for free and when there is a bug in the engine you can fix it yourself as the project is open sourced. Awesome! While waiting for BlitzMAX 2 to hit the shelfs, which will support mobile platforms, I will give processing now a test ride.

Good luck with all your corona adventures, I will stop alpha/beta testing for them now.
Michael Hartlef

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Dev mode switch to pause… Art mode ON

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Whitesky Games

Hi folks,

with the Corona Game Edition around the corner, I will pause the development of NeonCommand and will concentrate on the graphics now. I am debating if I should create them in Inkscape as pure 2D’s or render them with Blender and use toon shading there. Inkscape has the advantage, that I could scale the pictures like I need them. Ok, I Blender, I just need to adjust the outpout size. Anyway, the last days I was experimenting in Inkscape and to my surprise, the windows version behaves much more stable regarding the usage of filters and effects. If I go the vector route, I will mainly work in VMWare and Windows XP. The next days I will probably use to test more and see which workflow will give me the fastest results.

I might trash the neon look totally for a more cartoony style. My guess it that cartoony games have more success in the store than anything else. I keep you updated about the progress.

Have a nice weekend
Michael

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thinBasic 1.8 (final) is released

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Whitesky Games

Hi folks,

there is that awesome MS based programming language called thinBasic. I have created a few command extensions (modules) for it in the past and I am still involved within the community and module development. Anyway, version 1.8 is now out of beta stage and was released as final. Grab it while it is hot. If creating apps and games for the MS platform is your thing, than I recomment you to have a serious look into it.

Cheers
Michael

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Finally a new beta of Corona

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Whitesky Games

You now how it is. It can never be fast enough. But I just read that Ansca Mobile released beta 5 of the Corona SDK. I also read that they seem to have fixed some issues regarding the Android platform. Means you should be able to set the code versioning and the security settings for the Android platform. Sadly there is nothing mentioned about the Dalvik GC issue so it might be that Neon Command won’t see this platform for now. Also most native UI elements are still not supported. Now I am waiting for the Game edition to show up as this brings OpenFeint for the Iphone into the Game.

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