Cocos Creator vs Cocos2dx

Hi,

I’m developing a mobile app that we’re hoping to roll out in a few months and support it for many years from now on (hopefully!). The project started a few years ago, then we had a long break for other, smaller projects, and now we came back to it, already having a big codebase in cpp / Cocos2dx. Now, CocosCreator has come a long way in the meantime and I’m sort of starting to worry that writing in cpp becomes inefficient compared to using CC, and a bit… well… obsolete style?

Two questions:

  1. I was hoping to write all new stuff (e.g. new scenes) in CocosCreator and add it to my existing project - as a very slow and never-100%-migration - however, judging by what I’ve read, and this topic Integration of Cocos Creator v2.1.0 with cocos2d-x 3.17(c++) , it’s become impossible. Is that really so?

  2. I guess that it should be reasonably safe to stick to cpp, since CocosCreator will always rely on cocos2dx, right? Do I have anything to worry about, if I am planning to keep the project in cocos2dx? It should always be manageable to develop more or less anything I need in cpp, right?

Thanks.

Edit: @slackmoehrle , if you could spare a few minutes, I would be grateful. :slight_smile:

@kalika06

  1. We no longer develop a plugin to allow Creator to export scenes to c++.

  2. Cocos Creator uses “Cocos2d-x lite” it isn’t exactly cocos2d-x and to be honest, I am not entirely sure how much actual overlap there is anymore.

For me, and this has zero** to do with my position with the company…I’m starting to become fond of Typescript. I’m slowly adopting Creator as my tool of choice when I want to experiment with game ideas. Creator has become quite good and I can see the engineers pouring their best work into it. It is refreshing.

I was using Cocos2d-x before I was an employee at the company. It is near and dear to me you might say. Cocos2d-x was the engine that made my game dreams possible. I had tried Unity and Unreal and Cocos2d-x felt amazing to me. C++ was the first programming language that I learned at 16 years old. I’m not sure I could ever give it up.

This being said I am currently writing a Dr. Mario clone in Creator v3 as a hobby when I have time. Lately, I haven’t had time :slight_smile:

I wish I could give you more advice. It really is a matter of preference. If you have more thoughts please let me know.

Hmm, it’s not exactly a matter of preference now (although I would love to try CocosCreator… but having no spare time whatsoever, it’s impossible if I’m not using it for work). What I’m worried about, is survival :smiley: . Are we going to survive a couple of years on App and Play Store on cocos2dx, assuming that we do not need extra funky stuff in our simple 2D environment? I guess nothing worse than expeditiously implementing Metal support should happen…

Anyway - thank you for your time and sharing some of your dev-biography :slight_smile:.

I’ve realised that I am not being too clear. I guess what I am worried about is simply that cocos2dx in itself will eventually stop being supported / developed at a reasonable pace.

I see. Thank you for clarifying.

AFAIK Cocos2d-x isn’t going away and it is no secret that Creator is quite a large priority for us. The roadmap isn’t what it used to be, however. Releases are crafted around need versus milestones. I’d suggest staying in sync with GitHub so that when bugs are fixed you can do a git pull ... and then build/test. We aren’t releasing new versions, in the same manner, we used to by providing a .zip to download. I’m not saying this won’t change again but for now, this is how it is being done.

Does this help?

It does help a bit, thank you :slight_smile: .
I guess I have to stop worrying and keep feeling awesome about being a C++ programmer :stuck_out_tongue:

@slackmoehrle I think the modified cocos2d-x version running behind Creator needs to be the C++ version we C++ programmers should look for. I know the API has changed a lot, but if that code were available to developers (I think it isn’t right now) we could port our projects there without the need of re-writing all in Typescript and drawing the scenes in Creator. We will be all working on the same branch and the team wouldn’t have to maintain a different project.
I use Typescript as well and I love it, but I have a tremendous amount of code written on C++ and apps on the store that I cannot afford to rewrite on Typescript. @kalika06 (and I’m sure many other) are in similar situations.

I understand what you are saying.

From a traditional user’s point of view, it is annoying that they are promoting Cocos Creator, a JavaScript project, rather than cocos2d-x, a C++ project.
Anyway, I hope that the administrators will keep cocos2d-x, a C++ project, stable and well maintained.