Gideros

www.giderosmobile.com
Can I put my code made on Codea to this program. It is Lua and it can put your code onto both Android and IoS Markets?

No. That program uses a different API than Codea, very different. You could probably try recreating Codea’s functions using theirs, but it seems like it has a different style, i.e. no draw loop, and sprites stay in one spot until you tell them to move rather than redraw them each frame in a different spot.

I used Gideros Mobile before. You can probably find some really old posts by me on the forums when I knew nothing about coding. However, as @SkyTheCoder said, the API is very different. They have you manage the objects manually and they are automatically drawn. It also has a lot less capabilities than Codea.

That said, I do have a fair bit of experience with Gideros, actually the class system is very similar and depending on how you write your code with Codea you can make your life a lot easier.

As mentioned Codea uses a direct mode renderer (ie you have to redraw everything yourself every frame), whereas Gideros uses a retained mode (ie it keeps a list internally of what’s been added to the stage - just like Flash does) and then draw’s it all automatically.

I found that if you adhere to more OO principals and have objects that know how to update / draw themselves then you can simply run a loop to call each objects draw method (this code would just be ignored on Gideros as there is nothing to call the draw() function). Likewise calling each objects update method is basically the same as adding an onEnterFrame listener to each object in Gideros.

Other things to note - Gideros maintains a proper hierarchy of transforms for each object - this can be recreated by the use of the push / pop matrix functions.

The Gideros runner does a fair job of replacing airCode for development on PC.

Gideros uses the “traditional” 0,0 in the top left corner for it’s coordinates, again nothing that can’t be accounted for in an objects draw function.

I do agree with Zoyt that Codea is more flexible in a lot of ways (especially when it comes to rendering / drawing special effects / 3D transforms etc) - although the latest Gideros builds do allow access to the camera and shaders (just not as nicely as Codea :slight_smile: ), and Gideros doesn’t suffer from Apple’s dumb ass restrictions when it comes to importing assets into a project.

If cross platfrom (Android) development is an important consideration then keep the above in mind but be aware it won’t be a simple re-build, you will have some work to do - although if your careful you can restrict it to mostly rendering as opposed to game logic.