Monday, July 13, 2015

Corona SDK or native using LiquidFun?

I'm about to give up on using MyAppConverter's Sprite4Droid. My experience so far:

Their documentation on their website isn't that good. They have some "tutorial" videos which are recordings of using the tools, but with no audio and so they are of limited help. In the documentation they say that Eclipse will no longer be supported and you need to use Android Studio. That would be nice because Android Studio seems to work better than Eclipse. However their documentation has no info on setting up Sprite4Droid on Android Studio.

So I followed the instructions for setting up Eclipse but could not build my project. I checked out their forum to try and find answers to the problems I was having. There was one person who asked about the same problem I was having 4 months ago. The reply was that they were sending a readme file to him. That was the most recent message in their forum.

They have a chat option on their website. I've used it a couple of times and the person on the other end was very nice and helpful.

I was told that I needed to switch to an older version of Eclipse. Ugh. Well I did that and still had the same problem, I have a project but don't know how to get Eclipse to run the project. It turned out I needed to go to select "Run"->"Run Configurations.." on . Then select Android Application and click on the "New Launch Configuration" button. The click the "Browse" button and select my project.

I can then build the project. I try and run the project on an Android simulator, but it has to be configured first. Hmmm, the available configurations are for Nexus. Oh well I create a new configuration and call it Galaxy S5, and finally get the run to accept it as a device to run the app on. However as it builds and installs I get a bunch of warnings from Java. Oh man! I installed Java 1.8 and it is complaining that the library is built with an old compiler.

And it is at this point I am ready to give up on them. The forum is inactive with basically no help, and I have to downgrade Eclipse and Java to be able to make this work. I had high hopes but I think it is time I move on to something more productive.

I have a beginnings of Epic Color Crash written using the Corona SDK. Something felt wrong about how the balls fell on the screen, but watching the Sprite4Droid tutorial video it seems to have the same feel. So I am thinking that it is because the underlying engine is the same and the results with Corona may be just as good as Sprite4Droid.

I like developing on my MacBook Pro more than on my Mac Mini because it allows me to move work wherever I feel like it at the time. However this is an older MacBook Pro with a SSD that is just too small and I am always running out of disc space. I am going to replace the CD Rom drive with a 2 TB hard drive. Hopefully the replacement parts come soon. It is kind of hot up here in the library where the Mac Mini is.

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