We need a friendly ENGINE, not a dysfunction EDITOR

Ditto on wait you said. My experience about it.
Godot has lot of examples, afaik. It’s a 2d turned 3d engine with good community support. Anyway it’s artist-inclined, less programmers, more artists.
Atomic comes from Urho3d that’s what I’m using now. I turned to it mainly because of curiosity and the need for a full 3d engine, where cocos2dx is lacking, being more on the 2.5d kind-of 3d level, which is good, but not for fps kind-of games, that’s what I’m at now.
Anyway, both these latter engines went from 3d to 2d, and they’re not absolutely on par with coco2d-x 2d features… for instance, no director… no action-spawn-jumpby…
Moreover, these two require considerable technical understanding and definitely an advanced gaming creation level… by no way turn to these if you don’t have such an experience. Atomic is a bit more forgiving, being more tutored… but urho3d is definitely for programmer-inclined guys. No being artist there. So it’s a bit the opposite of Godot.
By the way, Godot is actually rated as the best open source engine for gaming by a sheer count of git commits and likes, followed at some distance by atomic.
Ending of TL;DR:
Switching to any of these if you don’t have a daring need for 3d features it’s absolutely not worth the while, unless you have a lot of time to spare/want to know new things. For 2d, cocos2d-x it’s still way faster, despite cranky installation, lacks of ECS and whatever.
Eventually, godot could be a 2d substitute. But forget programmers flexibility of “create C++ source, dig in”. It’s all visual. At that point, you could even choose Unity. Or simply stay with creator and cocos2-x as well, given that you know the sdk already.
There’s no perfect solution. But as this ongoing rant seem related to freedom of tinkering and missing to-be feature, I won’t be that worried. Cocos2d-x is a bit old, but it’s feature-rich and stable for 2d. It’s a good shot if want to have that job fast and done.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not related to Chukong. :wink:
since 2014 with cocos2d-x, since 2016 with urho3d. Next one: Unity/Unreal/MY OWN :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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And how do you think, with creator in future here will be artists forum or devs?

The answer is none, I think.
Because Creator isn’t a open-sourced project, it will be the next closed project. :thinking:

Ahh, reading @ricardo post about beginning of cocos2d: The history of Cocos2d in a glimpse :sunny: (before cocos2d-x) I remember all that days when I learned it first time and used. All was so cool and simple.

Some link from that post: About | cocos2d for iPhone

Looking at this picture makes me feel good in my soul.

Also, they tried to chose a normal way and create a normal editor using Qt(as I said before in some my posts in other threads). Not like cocos studio’s series and so on like current creator… which is mistake too.

@walzer why it was cancelled? It was a right way and Ricardo telling same as I told you already here:

Cancelling projects, specially when they are almost ready, can be frustrating. But our main challenge was finding a good business model. We tried different things, but we couldn’t find a good one.

In hindsight, this is what I think we should have done:

Work on just one editor: the Qt editor that was supposed to be the Cocos Studio replacement.
Offer services within the editor: SDKBOX, and other services.
Focus: Only work on casual/mid-core features (no VR or other distracting features). Try to be the best ones in that category.

Looking at the past, try to learn from your mistakes, but looking at creator… ehhm.

After all this, I have a feeling that a new reborn cocos should arise…
Something like: Fast. Free. Easy to use, community supported… and with current reality it should be also:

  • iOS, macOS, Android, Windows
  • C++ only
  • 2D only
  • comes vs optional open source cross-platform editor, normal editor with normal UX and ideology.

Editor to build your UI and publish resources(same idea as SpriteBuilder have). Currently it’s saves a lot of time for me. And designing levels in SB is a pleasure.

Looking at what planned for cocos2d-x like adding more 3D, more JavaScript as main language - this is really wrong…

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So cool ! This is my ideal engine.

It will be artist.
JS is easier, creator is easier, sdkbox is easier. More users, more chances.
Look at the c++ landscape, for istance, gui.
There’s no single c++ gui api that really works over multiplatform. None of them.
C++ is tough, and you don’t have Xcode to your back to spare you from building infrastructure…

Qt. You wrong. Or about what you talking?

Qt works excellent!

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QT… I was there. Better not. So old school, as if I returned back to 2000 and write by hand GUI.

Today I prefer Electron from GItHub for multiplatform

Oh, sorry, Forgot to tell you I’ve banned anything that’s more than 1gb installation from my mac.
In these times of header-only, mobile-friendly, sleek libraries, I’m sure to install that 15 gb monster…

I bet that you just don’t get how to use Qt properly.

Our AnySDK tool, a Chinese version of SDKBOX has been made with Qt. We have managed Qt development, but still decided to use the newest technology Electron to develop Cocos Creator.

Even Slack, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, Github’s Atom are made with Electron.

Please, bet. Easy money. =)

But you are wrong. I have good experience with many languages and technologies (I am open to everything new). That includes QT with three projects during last 20 years, and more recently few years back I was doing some private modifications to telegram desktop (yes, it uses QT). They should have read Modern C++, and written it in many cases similar to ns-3, using metaprogramming a lot. Also, maybe QT has inherited problems of C++ or any other reason of bloating so much?

Why not use cocos2d-x itself to create an editor? There would have to be created a whole new set of nodes (dropdown menus, checkboxes, tabs, popups, etc.) but in the end you will end up with a very lightweight editor that works on every platform.

Godot does this too by the way, the whole editor is using gui elements rendered by the engine itself.

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It’s not really good idea to use render of simple elements like buttons every frame, energy not efficient. So Qt is the best and I see now, if they tried it but later closed so they don’t want to use it. Thanks for killing cocos2d-x editor again… creator story will be same as studio…

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That is good idea from one side, and unpractical from another.

This was true for GitHub, when they created Electron and then Atom was written on top of it. Now a pleiades of new editors are created from Electron, e.g. Visual Studio Code and multiplaform apps are written (and as we check list of apps written on top of Blink, that potential is huge). The main point for Electron success is that they written own IDE first with it, tested and approved all own approaches.

But that is GitHub, it is big. For cocos to be written using own widgets will require double the amount of work for developers. Widgets do not look “natively” it will require modification/improvements. Given limiting amount of human resources here, it will delay Creator developoment.

“Visual Studio Code”
Sorry, but it’s just an editor, not an IDE. So it’s not really example. Text editor can be done in any language.

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Sorry but we are walking on a thin ice here. Same topic was true for Emacs (and same flame wars back then).

My main code editors at work are PhpStorm, PyCharm, Visual Studio (not code), and Android Studio. They are written in any language as any editor, that is true (for example Java =) ). Aah, you call them IDE for some reason.

But still I was able to efficiently create and deploy 3 projects for customers with Visual Studio Code. It is very powerful (you can check it’s plugins and how to develop and debug using it). For me it had code editor, completion, github integration, debugging, and others. I even configured same hot-keys as in PhpStorm. So I did not experience any difference, even though we use PhpStorm at full. Some minor things are missing, but they were missing for phpstorm at first and were added as plugins. No real big difference. I do not know why you do not want to call Visual Studio Code or Atom as IDE? Because wikipedia does not say so?

You can google for “Visual Studio Code + IDE or debugging” and “Atom as IDE”. Properly configured it is a full-fledged IDE.

Then for example we could name vi or notepad as fulfilled multiplatform IDE, because gcc is free available? I think no.

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If you configure vim then yes. Same for Emacs back in the days – quite known holly war. Check the definition of “IDE”, even though the correct definition is unknown. You will be surprised how small is requirement of IDE.

Let’s play a game, list the features which defines editor is IDE. For example, we will clearly see that Visual Studio, PhpStorm, AndroidStudio, PhpEd are IDEs and Atom, Visual Studio Code and Emacs are not. =)