Corona Weekly Update + Open Source

09 April 2013

Corona Weekly Update + Open Source

Last week, we launched a new public release along with Corona SDK Starter. I want to give you a quick update on all the great things we are adding to make Corona awesome for cross-platform app development. I also have some announcements on what we are doing in open source.

Before I go on, I just wanted to clarify a few things about last week’s announcement:

First, Corona Pro is currently available at $349. If you subscribe (or are already a subscriber) you will be able to renew for another 2 years. This is a fantastic time to get in before prices go up on May 1.

Second, I want to share our philosophy behind Corona SDK Starter. The goal is to allow you all to create real apps for FREE. That includes using your own custom splash screen, which is the typical restriction you see on products that are “fake free.”

The other thing, which I realized is worth explaining, is that Starter is going to be a continually evolving product. That means as time progresses, we are going to continue to explore how we can bring premium features and make them available to Starter developers. We are going to push the envelope on how we can do this to empower you, and still run a business so we can continue to innovate.

That’s all I’ll say for now, though the tidbit on open source applies to Starter developers, so if that’s you, keep reading!

Graphics

So last week, I showed you our awesome demo of 5000 fish at 60 fps. The great thing about that demo is that it shows we are building on a really solid and fast foundation as we think about adding awesome new graphics features. The big takeaway here is that we are trying to build an engine that lets you do amazing graphics features in real-time. So think of Photoshop and Illustrator effects without the progress bar. Pretty ambitious, but that’s our goal.

In terms of what we’re doing this week, we’ve broken ground on refactoring the architecture of our core engine code. The goal here is to make it easier for us to cleanly swap in the old and new graphics engines for things like regression testing. At the same time, we’re investigating render to texture support in the core renderer.

Plugins and Daily Builds

Daily Builds are going to resume tomorrow morning (assuming nobody broke the build). One of the check-ins you’ll notice is the following:

Gluon/Mac: Enable simulator device builds for iOS

What this means is the simulator will be able to do device builds that incorporate plugins hosted on our servers. We still want to do more testing before we let you play with it.

On top of that, we’re also hard at work building a growing library of hosted plugins. It will start small, as initially it will include plugins that we write or plugins that are written by 3rd party partners. The goal is to expand this out so more folks can write plugins that are hosted, but we want to be methodical about this.

Open Source: ‘widget’ and ‘gameNetwork’ for Corona Cloud

When we open sourced widget v1, we did it with the intention of making your lives better and to minimize the impact it had for those of you who weren’t quite ready to jump to widget v2. Our intention was to put more control into your hands.

We realized that we could do a couple of more things to make your life better and more manageable. Specifically, we’re going to open source ‘widget’ v2 and the ‘gameNetwork’ UI for Corona Cloud.

Relationship to Daily Builds

This is going to be especially useful for those of you who are using Corona SDK Starter. You will not have to wait until the next public release to get some critical bug fixes to these libraries, some of which are going in tomorrow’s Daily Build.

Our plan is to keep this reasonably in sync with what we’re putting out in Daily Builds.

License

The source code will be made available under a BSD license. If you use the open source version of either of these libraries, we’ve added a minor requirement that you add the following somewhere in your app (e.g., the credits):

This product includes software developed by Corona Labs Inc. (https://www.coronalabs.com).

Contributions and Pull Requests

We’ll be posting these on our github page by next week.

If you’re interested in helping us make these libraries better, we’ll be putting together some guidelines on pull requests.

As you can see, we’ve kept hard at work, even after a monumental release. I look forward to sharing more with you, from inside the Corona Labs kitchen!