Hi,
We’ve got a game project that was earlier created on Cocos Creator 1.9.x version, but was put on hold due to certain reasons.
Recently we resumed the work and tried to run the project on all 3 available versions of Cocos Creator i.e. v1.10.2, v2.0.10 and v2.1.1.
It was extremely disappointing to see that none of the 3 versions are fully compatible with the code (even after making all necessary changes recommended in the upgrade project log) which was working fine earlier.
On one, the game is functionally working fine on the Cocos Simulator but breaks down the moment it tries to do the same on Android. the other 2 versions are flickering insanely on simulator itself. Rich Text has lot’s of issues in simulator itself. None of them is able to create a JSON object from a local file on Android. We tried both the following methods:
var url = cc.url.raw( "resources/Data/GlobalData.json" );
cc.loader.load( url, function( err, res) {
dataManager.setGlobalData( res.json );
} );
Or
var gData = JSON.parse( jsb.fileUtils.getStringFromFile( cc.url.raw(path) ) );
The above issue may look like just another bug, but it has left me wondering that if the platform was not stable why were the earlier versions removed from the downloads page. I am very concerned about your approach to build the overall Cocos ecosystem.
I’ve been an ardent follower of Cocos2D since almost 8-9 years now. That’s a long enough time for this platform to become stable. But here’s my observation:
- You abruptly end support to platforms/editors without giving a second thought about it’s impact on developers, who were dependent on it for it for all the games that were in pipeline or already released.
- You push new releases without checking for it’s stability and backward compatibiltity.
- Your releases are not marked as major or minor, stable or unstable.
- Complete Change logs/Build notes are not accompanied with each release.
- The editors are filled with all kinds of glitches.
- The game looks and works differently, be it in Editor, Simulator or the Device.
- Your documentation is all over the place.
- You’ve spread your team thin trying to achieve too many things at the same time, not taking the time see the impact it has on people that are dependent on it.
You’re ready to break everything to rebuild a free replica of Unity3D, but you seem oblivious about it’s impact on existing products.
Yes Unity3D is very costly and that is one of the reasons we choose Cocos for developing games that don’t really need all kinds of fancy hodge podge. But editor cost is just one part of the development cost. A majority component of the development cost is that of hundreds of man-hours of people working on it. Their time goes to waste / idle when we run into issues because the development platform was EOL’d or unstable.
Cocos 2D once was an absolutely amazing and promising platform that we used to love developing games on but it is increasingly looking unreliable, and I’m forced to consider other platforms like Defold or Godot for future development. Yes there’s a new learning curve, but at least I’ll know that the platform is stable and dependable.
You can take this post as mindless blabber or a wake up call.
Yours Sincerely