Coco studio cancelled?

Cocos Studio will not be open-sourced. Why? It took a staff of 66 people, several years, to get to the point it was at and this took a lot of money. Also, we don’t have the resources to support it.

I know, some might say, the community will provide the resources. However, there is still a need for us to be present with things that come up and we don’t have the resources. We need to maintain focus on the engine, Creator, forums, etc, etc.

To this end, Creator will have c++ support and there is already a Studio -> Creator importer being worked on.

I hope that you all understand.

2 Likes

“Creator will have c++ support and there is already a Studio -> Creator importer”
If both of this works, then we are saved. :smile:

Thanx

Ok, I think that’s good news overall, I agree there was some fundamental flaws in CS. Thanks for keeping us updated.

Any ETA for C++? It would be nice to have a rough estimate.

I’d say before June. But let us ask @pandamicro to clarify when c++and the Studio->Creator importer is expected.

Can creator be used like studio? We only want to design scenes, nothing more. Just a visual scene editor like cocos studio was…

I hope that we can import csbs to Creator or to cocos2d-x directly… because I have all my animations in this format! :frowning:

I’m very inactive in this forum recently. But hope someone still remember me, oops.

About Cocos Studio

Cocos Studio was started at 2012, inherited from an in-house editor for Chukong’s Fishing Joy 2. A chief programmer from Fishing Joy 2 became the leader of Cocos Studio. The original goal is to have a solid editor for Cocos2d-x. I haven’t gotten actual control of this project until 2014 Q4. The leader of Cocos Studio refused to accept any suggestions from neither Ricardo nor me.

At 2015 January, Cocos Studio still has a very bad reputation, especially in China. Here’s a link to Zhihu (can understand as Chinese Quora) https://www.zhihu.com/question/36068758, you can read via google translate. Users are asking why Chukong haven’t redesigned an editor even if everyone knows Cocos Studio is very hard to use. Only a small percentage of cocos2d-x users use Cocos Studio in their commercial games. And without a solid editor, the R&D progress of cocos2d-x on 3D features are very slow.

When I look back to the failure of Cocos Studio, I think there’re some key factors:

  • Use mono and C# as programming language, which is different from cocos2d-x major languages: C++/Lua/JavaScript. That means, if Studio has a extension mechanic, developers had to use C# to write a plugin for Studio, use C++ to extend cocos2d-x framework, and use Lua/JavaScript to write game logics.
  • Haven’t adopt data-driven design
  • Have no extension/plugin mechanic. No one has created a plugin for Cocos Studio.

About Cocos Creator

In 2014, Chukong invested a new company to create an editor for HTML5. That’s Fireball-x. In 2015 Q4, when I was back to lead the whole engine department, I made the decision of acquiring Fireball-x. With the whole Fireball-x genius and the original cocos2d-x team, we have the new editor Cocos Creator.

Cocos Creator are trying to meet the requirement of C++ and Lua today, while its original target market and basis architecture was HTML5. We indeed have some solutions in evaluation, but it takes time.

The Creator team is made up with best developers, many of them are very active in this forum, such as @pandamicro @zhangxm @owen, they are always ready to listen and help developers. The leader of Cocos Creator is a game designer. He used to worked in Germany, in Ubisoft, created PC web game via Unity, created a popular Unity plugin ex2d. I think he is even more experienced then Ricardo and I in the game industry.

The Replacement

At 2016 January, we released Cocos Creator v0.7-beta.

I hoped we can still keep both Studio and Creator on development parallel in at least 6 months, have a smooth switch. But in March, the board of Chukong finished their patience. They don’t want to invest in 2 editors competing with each other and waste money. “So if Creator is better, close Studio”.

Currently, the whole Cocos Studio team are all laid off. The project of Cocos Studio is totally closed now.

The Next

Closing Cocos Studio was done in a hurry, not my expectation. As everyone can see, Cocos Creator is not ready enough today to fully replace Cocos Studio. What we’re doing are:

  • A converter to import Studio project into Creator (coming very soon)
  • Lua support
  • C++ support
  • Documentation: Studio to Creator Migration Guide

@slackmoehrle already posted the roadmap of Cocos Creator
I can’t guarantee every feature goes on time, but we will DO OUR BEST.

17 Likes

Hi @walzer. Thanks for your explanation.
Well Creator is not mature eough , but is better that fight with a bad “editor”. In this situation, I guess that it’s better break with the past and start something from the scratch.

Nice! i will wait for the c++ support then… and you have any news about the cocos installer?

There will be a new Cocos Installer after v3.11, I believe.

The cocos installer will probably be rewritten based on Cocos Creator architecture: electron.

Hi @walzer:

Thanks for your detailed explanation. It works to understand the current situation.

Now, I would like to add a fix into Cocos Studio reader, but my PR was rejected because Cocos Studio team was dissolved: https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/pull/15366

Could you help me, please? Maybe @slackmoehrle?

Thanks and best!

@waizer thanks for detailed explanation.

What worries me is this:

If you update Cocos2d-x to a version greater than v3.10, you may experience compatibility issues.

I think decision of getting rid of Cocos Studio was too harsh. Even you don’t want to add new features or even fix bugs you can at least keep cocos2d-x compatible until some major release in the future when cocos creator, import tool from cocos studio would be done and mature enough to be a full replacement. Let’s say we have these tools, but I have to change a lot from code too, right? I have an almost complete game, developed from last half of year, fully based on cocos studio. I cannot imagine changing all that code to get back working what was done. Of course I can keep on 3.10, but let’s be frank sooner or later I’d forced to update to newer version because of some changes with OS (iOS 10 may be the closest thing, Apple loves to break everything) or other stuff.

There is a reader coming to take Studio files and bring them into Creator.

@patriciog Cocos Studio was a private GitHub repo. I don’t have access to help with anything.

I see, but will CSLoader (createNode, createTimeline), ActionTimeline etc would work as before with cocos creator?

@walzer If cocos creator is already based on Electron/Node/Chrome JS engine, are there any plans to migrate JSB from Firefox JS engine to Chrome JS engine?

I think it will help with debugging using Visual Studio code etc (also based on electron), and let us use the latest JS 6 features, classes etc…

(On a side note, whichever JS engine is used, including TypeScript bindings for javascript code can dramatically improve the intellisense suggestions by VS Code, and show better compile-time errors. Otherwise for many simple mistakes, JS doesn’t complain till run-time. Please consider including TypeScript bindings for javascript API).

1 Like

I don’t know how it is being designed. @nantas2 @pandamicro do you know about what @piotrros is asking?

Cocos Creator + C++ = Magic

Waiting…

Hi @slackmoehrle:

My PR was sending to public GitHub cocos2d-x repo where Cocos Studio reader is open source (cocos/editor-support/cocostudio).

To test it you have all versions of Cocos Studio available on cocos2d-x.org servers: http://www.cocos2d-x.org/filedown/CocosStudio_v1.6.0.0.exe

I don’t understand what is the problem here.

Thanks and best!