‘Whoa’ is right… Our Corona SDK gets major update!
Carlos Icaza, Ansca Mobile
Thank you all very much for all the emails, support, calls and warm welcome of our updated Corona SDK. The last few months have been very exciting here at Ansca and we are all very proud of the new bits we released yesterday. As with any software release and product updates, it goes without saying that it comes with a few glitches and ‘dropped’ features, but do not despair, we have a log of requests, fixes and tweaks that we will roll into our daily builds. I think that our daily build updates was superb during this release cycle as you were getting the latest bug fixes, feature implementation as we were practically closing the entries in our bug base. With the Windows release now in full force, the daily builds will have both set of targets going forward and now that the Windows and Android version are very close to the iOS version, we plan to do simultaneous fixes on both platforms as we continue developing Corona.
Stabilizing Corona for Android was quiet a challenge, and I think some of you were privy to my tweets as to how challenging it was. But our world class team of engineers was able to pull through and delivered a solid Android 2.2 ARMV7 release that has shown dramatically performance improvement across the board. It was hard to make the decision to drop support for Android OS 2.1 and below, but thanks to your feedback, and paying close attention to the market shifts, we made the right decision and I think that collectively we all agreed it was the right one to do.
You have read the press release, and seen all the new features we added, so I won’t go too much into it because I want to focus on what is coming up.
From a Corona perspective we have two areas of focus in this next release. I mentioned them before, but to give you a refresher, here they are: Monetization and Graphics improvements. And they are both easy to understand. We are going to shift focus on how to make it easier for you to monetize using Corona more than just with ads. Aside from all the engineering work we poured into Corona, Walter and I have also been in talks with ‘monetization’ vendors and what we have lined up for you guys next will hopefully make it so that you can maximize the different monetization options we plan to add into Corona.
We will have a few announcements in regards to the different monetization options and partnerships and as soon as we have them ready to roll out, you will get them on the daily build to pick up and run with it like you guys did with we added GameCenter support via OpenFeint. Last, in terms of monetization, we are exploring other ways for you to monetize your assets. How about I leave it at that. Any conspiracy theorist out there care to figure out what this is?
The next area of focus is graphic enhancements. Do I need to say more? We will focus from increasing our graphic pipeline performance, to adding shaders, to hard-core graphic features such built in curve-fitting all the way to raster and imaging enhancements. Photoshop anyone? UGHGH I get carried away sometimes… Oh behave !
In the next few days I wil update the roadmap which is long overdue. I also hope to host a webcast for next Friday. And we will continue to have more development kitchens.
Also, we have exciting news coming out next week. It will probably be the second biggest news this year (Bubble Ball, (thanks Robert) being the top news for us so far this year) and I think you will all like what we have to share.
Last but not least, keep your eye out for a brief note from me tomorrow about couple of new clowns who joined the asylum.
In the meantime, thanks again for all your support and as always, keep surprising us with the apps you guys have been developing with Corona. I swear, some of the apps am like, done in Corona? really? WOW? You guys do an amazing job in all your apps. Keep surprising us.
Thank you
Carlos
apologies for the long wordy blog post….
RSS feed
Is there anywhere we can read up on the UI? Would be good to understand its full capabilities, parameters, etc Thanks!
Great job, we will buy 2 more licenses this week.
Imaging enhancements are fine, but I’m still waiting for a high quality vector graphic API (build-in bezier, bezier-shapes, clipping) and text rendering (paragraphs, text-clipping…). Should not be such hard to do, since iOS and Android provide such stuff.
Can’t wait to see the imaging side of things. I’m doing a lot within XCode for image manipulation, but it’s always interesting to see the other options coming out… and I am keen to use Corona in some respect for some of my upcoming apps.
As a graphics guy, I am happy to hear this.
My BIG QUESTION: Will we ever have the ability to animate an object along a path like we can do in Flash? Is this realistic to ask for? This would REALLY be big for me at least. If there is a way and I just am not aware, please someone point me in the direction!
But you guys were involved with the Flash development so I would think this would be no biggie for men of your caliber (a little buttering up never hurts, eh?)
Thanks again for Corona, I feel as excited now as I did back when Flash and Actionscript were fresh and new!
So for few days now I’ve seen blog posts about new features, but no documentation and no links to where users can actually obtain these new features. I had to search for CoronaSDK on twitter and sift through tweets to find a link to CoronaUI, for example.
Also not sure why there is such a big focus on CoronaUI. If we want to make table apps we can just use the Apple SDK, which is more stable and robust in that respect anyway. How about more relevant features like an XML file parser or ad support?
^ User7, we have a link to the Corona UI direct download page in our previous “Whoa” blogpost under the bullet-point talking about Corona UI.
Also, we have a link under the same bullet-point to Carlos’ tweet about it, so you could’ve saved yourself a whole lot of sifting just by clicking that!
@noah @joe
see
http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/bezier-object-along-curves-path
http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/bezier-curves-corona
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=722su8kVYW4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v63NAzQE7Bw
http://www.carlosicaza.com/?p=194
@user7
stopgap : xml and json provided with xmlua and jsonlua. see lua.org.
What exactly does it mean that you are dropping support for Android 2.1? That’s 27% of Android owners. Does that mean apps built with Corona won’t run at all on those devices?
Build-in Ads support is a must-have feature, and we need it ASAP !!!
@Carlos
I can see many new features on the roadmap but no fine tuning and debugging of some core features that are currently not working as expected. One of them is SpriteSheets:
http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2011/03/21/why-sprite-library-needs-urgent-debugging
We can’t really use the “sprite” engine in a complex app, with all the bugs that it currently involves. These bugs are there for many months and most of them are being “tracked” since 2010. If they are not resolved with a “graphics enhancements” release what else should we hope for??
More features built on bugged old ones generate even more new bugs!
Please don’t let Corona SDK fall in this trap. There is nothing worst for a piece of software than getting the reputation of being full of bugs.
Cheers
@user7 : dropped already. not that we are dropping. starting this release, android 2.1 and below is no longer supported.
@magenda ” but do not despair, we have a log of requests, fixes and tweaks that we will roll into our daily builds.”
@khan.do “announcements in regards to the different monetization options and partnerships and as soon as we have them ready to roll out”
Great update! Glad fast app switching is finally working
Such a shame that the iPod music problem is still there though, hopefully that will be sorted in a daily! 
great, but still need multi-line input text boxes…
Please, not again: My question regarding a solid vector graphic API always is newly responded with this bezier code. C’mon — you know what I mean! As @Noah said: You guys were involved in Flash tech so you should know what 2D vector graphic means in detail.
@joe : i thought i had written “hard-core graphic features such built in curve-fitting” in my blog post, but I guess I was mistaken. The links were to reinforce the fact we are working on vector graphics and to re-inforce your statement that we know 2D really well. I mean, Walter and I did work on some old, out of date, prehistoric Illustrator at one point in our life.
C.
@user7: “If we want to make table apps we can just use the Apple SDK”
The answer to that question is the same as if you asked: why make games with Corona, I mean you can do that with the Apple SDK.
That’s not really a fair comparison Joe. It’s simple to make tables with the Apple SDK, and they work great (whereas even the simple examples included with CoronaUI are buggy). It’s not so simple to make games with Apple’s UIKit. That’s what Corona is good at and in my opinion what the developers should be focusing on, at least until the game API is more fully developed and stabilized.
Hi Carlos,
I’m new to the Corona community and very excited to have found it. I’m doing pre-production work for a game on the iPad (initial targeted device) and there is one thing my game will need and that’s shader support. I see that back in April of last year it was announced that support would be added in the next major release. Is there any kind of time frame you can give for the release of that next major version?
Also, I looked around and saw that additive blending has been added and others were “in the works”. Were other blending modes added yet or not?
This is the first video game my small company has ever developed and we are super excited. (We have been a web dev company for the past 4 years.)
Thanks in advance!
For one thing, I see that