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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Now it's competing with Cocos2D.

Yeap, except it's a complete different league. Cocos2D-X (which is the real cross-platform equivalent) is an absolute nightmare for beginners. Last time I checked, there was no documentation except in chineese, and you wouldn't even know where to look when you wanted to do some networking.

Unity truly is a marvelous piece of technology and ecosystem.

I actually bought "Cocos2d-X By Example Beginners Guide" and it was very easy to get up and running with a demo application. The samples included with the framework itself show off a features and nothing has been all that complex, and I have made a bunch of 2D test applications already (XCode + iPad simulator)

Thanks for mentioning this book, I've wanted to dig into cocos2D for a while but the lack of a good beginner book kept me from getting too far. I picked it up last night and it's exactly what I've been looking for. Awesome thanks!

I think soon you will have good news about this from the cocos2d-x side.

The biggest problem I found with Cocos is trying to google for something. If you're developing for iOS, then it's fine. But if you're looking into, say HTML5 canvas, finding a working JavaScript example for something is like looking for a needle in a heystack.

This is one of the main reasons I gave up on Cocos and used EaselJS for my last project.

And MOAI, which is far better than Cocos2D, imho, although requires a bit of effort to truly 'grok' properly so that you can get things happening ..

That said, you can't deny that Unity has the toolset market pretty much cornered. If someone came up with some editors for MOAI, it might be an interesting world indeed ..

Except there is no way to create an editor for moai.

Moai is a very low-level framework. Basically just a tad bit higher than OpenGL, + lua bindings

Thats really not true - its quite possible to build an editor for MOAI .. in fact, I would wager that it'll be easier to build an editor for MOAI now, than it was to build the environment for Unity...

Any opinion on Moai vs CoronaSDK? I know people who use Corona, but not Moai.

Moai is opensource, lower-level engine that appeals more to those that want full control and customization. Tooling is mostly "bring your own editor/ide" (Intellij has a good Lua plugin[1] and there's also Zen Braine studio[2]). Personally, I would rather use it over Corona, but those aspects are appealing to me, but could be off-putting to others. You'll be looking through the Doxygen documentation and perhaps even the C++ source at times to figure things out in Moai. The plus side is much of the design/best practices of Corona Game Examples (or any other Lua Game framework, like LÖVE) can be used to model your Moai development, omitting the API differences.

Corona is more for those that want a high level game engine and all the tools for it built in as well as more beginner friendly (larger community, documentation, ease of use). The drawbacks are limitations from the source being closed and in the past there were performance issues for Android/iOS, but I have not tried Corona lately so it may have improved in that area.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/sylvanaar2/lua-for-idea/wiki/Home

[2] http://studio.zerobrane.com/

A lot of people seem to be dissing cocos2d here. The iPhone version is actually really good, it's the tech behind many successful iOS games such as Kindom Rush, Badlands, Megarun, Scramble with Friends, Tiny Tower, Feed Me Oil, Tap Zoo, Zombie Farm. Many of which have reached the top grossing list. How many 2D Unity3D games have reached high up on the top grossing list? Is there any other game than Bad Piggies?

Also, now with Apportable, porting to Android is a breeze. It's possible to have a running port within a couple hours.

And another good thing with Cocos2D is that you get the full source, allowing you to do basically anything you want and get good performance out of it.

Not sure about Cocos2D-X, but now thanks to Apportable, it's now possible to stick to Obj-C with is really nice.

"How many 2D Unity3D games have reached high up on the top grossing list?

Quite many, I'd say. Looking at top 50 grossing for iPhone right now, I see Temple Run 2, The Hobbit, Kingdoms of Camelot, Subway Surfers, CSR Racing at least; and probably some others I don't recognize. Many others have been in the top charts at various points in the past.

Are these 2D games?

Not sure about Cocos2D-X Ricardo Quesada, Cocos2D creator, is now moving from Zynga to Chuking Technologies (Cocos2D-X): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6348565

And he is proficient in C++ and Objective-C.

Indeed, this will make Unity a direct competitor with many cross-platform 2D game SDKs. Here's one list (on a site I maintain):

http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-for-making-2d-mobile...

It was already, for a really long time. There are already quite a few capable Unity3d 2d frameworks, and a lot of companies created their own in-house solutions anyway.

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