The best would be:
Editor: Godot
Engine: Cocos2d-x cpp
The main idea of editor + engine is same codebase. Like it was for SpriteBuilder and Cocos2D-Objc. And also, all way itās designedā¦ and what and how it works. Iām talking about editor.
I personally have best editor for cocos2d-x and itās SpriteBuilderX. Yes, itās not really using same codebase: cocos2d-objc for editor and cocos2d-x as engine, but works perfectly.
p.s. I really donāt like black colors in any editor 
I want a simple white theme, otherwise will not use it.
I know what are you talking about. Of course itās nice if an editor has the same codebase.
And sure, for cocos2d-x cpp the SpriteBuilder customization is a really great Job.
More friendliest as Cocos Studio was.
Cocos Creator and cpp integration i canāt say anything, because till now i didnāt try it.
Sometimes maybe.
At the moment i also use SpriteBuilder-X (cocos2d-x 3.13) and sometimes (yet) Cocos Studio with 3.10 cocos2d-x.
But belive me, one of the best editor i met (2d) is Godot. Every shit is a node. Buttons, Labels, ui, sprites whatever you want, everything. Not widgets, Scenes, Layers, etc And of course you can transform, or do every animation, or whatever eyecandy you want with them.
To edit a scene is really joyful.
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Iāve tried it before. Deleted it very fast. Again - design and idea of how SB works is perfect.
Main task for editor is simple - just to assemble the scene. And it should work closely with the engine.
Thats another wayā¦ and thats why cocos2d family is most successful like been said in some previous post.
I just want to add, that copying design of unity is totally wrong idea. Trying to be matched to something that really different and canāt be matchedā¦
So, how editor + engine should work? A perfect example is a SpriteBuilder+Cocos2D.
Also, I donāt think that if the current editor will be made open source, it will solve the problem. Itās in design, how it all work and madeā¦ wrong.
I think biggest problem - that cocos2d-x team focus on Asian market, they just donāt care about our opinion as they revenue comming not from us but China:) - where JS is dominating and only way to make something cool. They donāt care much about quality - current JS implementation for web just donāt match sharpens and quality of c++ code.
Release of 3.15.1 just proves it added HUWAI phone optimization - first release with such small improvements.
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Well, so soon we will say goodbye
I hope no 
option v2 making branch of cocos2d-x taking cool devs to development and now there is new engine)
Thats can be something like cocos2d-x classic, with removing a lot of things that makes cocos2d-x too heavyā¦
But fork always bad idea, need a new project, with notice - ābased onā or smth.
KAMIKAZE:
I also used Spritebuilder with cocos2d. Itās ok, but lacks with some featureā¦
Godot (copy-paste):
Visual editor, full of mature tools.
Uncluttered UI, with context-sensitive editors.
Amazing scene system, supporting instancing and inheritance.
Friendly content creation interfaces for artists, level designers, animators, ā¦
Visual shader editing for 2D and 3D.
Persistent live editing (changes are not lost after stopping the game). Live editing on mobile devices!
Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks.
Work in pixels as your units, but scale to any screen size and ratio.
Custom 2D physics engine that works in pixel coordinates.
Flexible kinematic controller for collision without physics.
Blit 3D models as sprites into 2D.
Animate 2D or 3D. Visual animation editor with timeline.
Frame-based or cut-out animation for sprites and rigs.
Any property of any object can be animated, even function calls.
Use custom transition curves and tweens.
Helpers to animate 2D rigs, with skeletons and IK.
Efficient optimizer to pack imported 3D animations.
Animation Tree support for fluid character animation.
Lack of features is not a point, but a design. How it works and madeā¦ Features can be added, that not a problem.
Also, want to add: best tool for creating cross-platform editor is Qt. Would be perfect to use cocos2d-x for render scene there. Thats actually how SB works(just to clarify itās not using Qt but renders scene by using cocos2d).
I am working on cocos2d-x though other developers focus on JS. I can not change the decision, but i will try my best for the engine.
7 Likes
Try to put my 5 cents too. (I honestly try to read all the discussionā¦).
- Youād be surprised for what people use cocos2dx except games. Really. I know an electrical TRUCK vehicle with hmi dashboards written on cocos. why? because its open source, c++ based and other alternatives are worse. Its not that you have to change your focuses because of that, just to notice that some amount of such developers exists.
- very basic things still must be done. I mean really basic. On that weekend Iām second time rewrite cocos2dx/android/platform classes (like Helper wrappers etc) because I was need to run cocos inside fragment on android. Iāve made it, I will share the solution to my github, but all the info I found on the web about it was some issue when cocos guy said that its not an important feature. not an important feature? And whats more important if Iāve done it (not very well formed solution but still) in 1.5 days, cocos2dx developer could done such changes (without disable any feature) in some reasonable amount of time.
Let me tell some important feature which from my homble perspective is a must:
- One buttom crashlitics support. How many topics started here about integrating different crashlitics / crash reporting solutions ? It should be as simple as it is now in android studion for regular android projects. It is a feature no one should doing more than 30 minutes to integrate with.
- One button google adwords support. And when I need one button support (or one line support) I mean that at that very second when I google it (ācocos2dx adWordsā) I should see a few paragraph manual about how to do it with regular c++ project, not dozens of forum topics with questions and hacking. I know about sdkBOX, it didnāt helping mush actually. and there is still no tutorial about it or page.
- Antialiasing help. Really. When you start drawing things with DrawNode you facing aliasing. And you find 100 topics with different not working solutions and tweaks and shaders on forum. You really think that its not important? Again let itāl be at least some good placed tutorial about what you can do about it. I end up linking libskia, draw with it and then draw resulted bitmap with cocos. in what universe this is ok?
- Android Fragments support. I want to insert some spine, maybe some 3d or 2d action into my project. For now its the two different universe - one with material design and another with full screen cocos, ocupated all the things. And material universe are pretty damn good. why I canāt use the power of both? And donāt say that its too contraversal design solution, let me handle my own ui/ux. To this point goes as well - simple project for android widgets (or at least tutorial).
- Modularity. First, huge thanks to all involved for Android Studio support. Its a huge success, really! Handling cocos2dx as a AS java module is convenient, but can we do more? Its still some work to do, while Iām adding some library to android studio project with one line of gradle and when I need to change the whole project and adding fragments support by my own.
- Multi resolution screen support with easy. We have one tutorial. The most incredible things about tutorial about multi resolution screen support it that markup of the article are skewed on my default chrome browser. but thats ironic. Donāt we need more simple tutorial about that? We have some pictures like from old age tv hardware crt and some shitty displayed code. Where can I find tutorial with example of different resources and different screen policy which handle some good amount of android / ios? I really want this. And as you can see Iām talking more about tutorials and clean-ups, because you have great basis. Its just very strange that people who starts canāt do simple things simple.
- Tutorials!. Just to add more value to that point. I donāt talk about rendering classes documentation - Iām talking about simple things which every trying cocos will try.
- Language. I respect every one culture, but most of the time when I google cocos info I thinking about starting learning Chinese. And Iām really not very exited about it. Iām bad at english myself, but I think people can understand what Iām writing and if I can (perhaps with many errors) explain something on international language Iāll will definitely do. I donāt want to share some experience only to people at russia because itās a little bit selfish and strange. and is it a great thing to multiply your auditory by millions of people on the web? Some time I even think adding some chinese to my profile in order to get more adecvate response here at forum. And its a great frustratuion to know that somewhere deep at chinese internet there is solution to many your problem and you just canāt get it.
- Library. I think we have so many android apps is in many ways related with numbers of great libraries and easy way to include them. I know that for cpp is not easy, but canāt we provide some way ? I finding great nice pice of android libraries every day, just for small things but its really a pleasure. If I found some cocos sample on github I can only try to compile it, understand and move somehow to my own project. Its really huge step backward from gradle compile bla bla bla.
All that is just the trend basic things. Be able to imitate material design with cocos widgets? good. How many people release pixel graphics games? A lot ! How can I do it with cocos? Where the simple tutorial about that?
How is all this related to the topic theme? I just care about cocos2dx a lot, since I work with it every day at work. With the engine. And I feel that not all that good, so we can move to another project to develop. How can I help? Maybe we need to create more tutorials by ourself. Maybe I can do that, but with all the efforts dropped to some ide development I canāt be sure that what I will telling people is correct and good. And all such activity will require some attention from cocos team. Why I saw some old bullshit at the tutorial part of the cocos site?
You have such a beautiful engine. We all have, thanks to you. but it takes really big efforts to see that =)
With great respect.
3 Likes
@owlet thanks for your comment and suggestion. Following is my thought:
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About Android Fragment support: sorry, i am not familiar with it and i donāt know whatās the benefit of it and how to use it. Could you please describe it in more detail? After the discussing, i think we can create an issue for it.
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One button crash support. Yep, i think it is needed, but i think we need a way that can work both on Android and iOS. Do you have any suggestion?
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Modularity. Again, could you please describe it in more detail? Could you please show me the usage?
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Multi resolution screen support with easy. I think
cpp-empty-testis the real sample. -
Tutorials. I hope the community can help to improve it. I am busy fixing bugs, maintaining english and Chinese forum.
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Language. I donāt quite understand what you mean? I think most thread in the forum are in English. And we always ask developers using english in this forum and github issues.
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Library. Donāt quite understand it. Could you please describe it in detail? Thanks.
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One button google adwords support. It is about business issue. SDKBox is used for market except China, and AnySDK is used for Chinese market. They are all 3rd party services integration framework invested by Chukong.
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Antialiasing help. I added comment in this issue, but nobody response it.
I donāt understand the peoples who makes descision from the future of cocos2d-x:
If i see this: https://html5gameengine.com/
There are about 20 engines as alternativ. Why cocos2d-x do not stays on the unique c++ way?
Or i ask other: if i would like to use js, why the f*** should i choose cocos2d-x?
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Weāre trying to make SDKBox as easy as possible, whatās your needs?
SDKBoxās doc and source and lots of samples
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I was just about to say sdkbox provides a pretty fast admob solution
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Totally agree +1.
I think it should be cocos2d-js there, because cocos2d-js is a submodule of cocos2d-x, so thatās why there is cocos2d-x. Its just my guess.
About cocos2d-x, did you mean cocos2d-x donāt need JS/lua binding, just pure c++ codes?