“Codea 1.3 is likely to be the next version. And will be a pretty huge update. Details coming soon.”
@Simeon! Don’t tease. Yer killing me.
My guesses (Disclaimer - I’m in the beta, but no beta on this):
1) removal of .codea import (and export?) (Aside: Maybe they'll let you "brand" .codea files to your own ipad, so at least you can use it as a backup/restore mechanism without having to tether to the host PC and clobber the whole thing?)
2) Add native text support (w00t!)
3) Editor improvements (going to error tab and location automatically)
4) Bluetooth gaming stuff
5) Lua 5.2
6) removal of sockets from beta (I'm TORN here. I want to do cool stuff, but it's pretty obvious Apple will put the kibosh on this. Giving up writing sockets stuff [I'm working on a thing to use the ipad as a touchpad for your PC] will hurt, but I'm feeling very "forever alone" writing stuff nobody can use... YET).
Wishlist (that won’t be there): Sockets, GLSL, filesystem (non-native).
Email sharing feature will be back (after its removal on 1.2.7). Well, I hope. :D
Native text drawing. I think it's a given since @simeon had previewed it.
More shape drawing API. Such as triangle and polygon. I also expect arc and pie here, rather pessimistic though. But still no flood fill.
More editor improvements, especially for better debugging. Agree with @bortels here. :)
New API to detect device orientation.
New API to access some other sensors (gyro, compass, etc), also camera perhaps.
New API to access keyboard events.
New parameter controls for other data types beside numeric.
New sprite pack bundle(s). Playing card, I hope. :D
New physics engine. It's there but not yet come in full as it's a first release.
Still no gesture API. I bet this will come in the next major version.
Still no socket. I bet this will come in the next major version, if at all. I think 2LL will play safe with this "dangerous" stuff. :)
Still no bluetooth stuff. I bet this will come in the next few minor version, or the next major version.
Still no (virtual) filesystem. I bet this will come in the next major version.
Still no access to on-device user library such as Photo and Music. I bet this will come in the next major version, if at all.
Still no Lua 5.2 due to lack of time and testing. I bet it will come in the next minor version, unless 2LL will delay 1.3 release for some reasons (release some 1.2.x minor updates?).
Still no text-mode screen. I bet this will come in the next few major version, if at all.
Of course, bug fixes, more complete docs, and new examples are given. :)
To make this game more interesting… please, beta users, don’t tease us about what are currently available on beta version. And to @simeon, please hold your new Roadmap post for the next 2-3 days.
Heh - we haven’t seen a beta update in a while (or I haven’t) - to my knowledge, the only “big” thing in the beta that’s not in 1.2.7 is sockets, and like I say - they stink of death right now.
(I so hope I’m wrong - my touchpad app, where the ipad acts as a “magic mouse” for a regular web-based drawing app, is like 98% close to working - the Codea part is fine, I’m actually running into node.js issues [things I think should be strings… aren’t]. In a nutshell, the codea app is sending touch events via UDP to a node.js server, said server also acting as a websockets connector - touch events go via UDP to server, back out via websockets to browser, which then does the draw.)
I think 5.2 is unlikely as well this go-round. I think the new spritepacks are a very possible call. native text drawing, I agree, should be a slam-dunk.
I think bluetooth stuff (no.13) will come along with the planned Codea Player/Viewer app. Both for project sharing (copy project from editor to player/viewer) and for multiplayer.
I just downloaded last version a few days ago, pre-email ban. I’ve been coding like crazy, finaly the iPad is a programmable computer!
I generally think codea is great, but I’m kind of upset about the removal of emailing. Lua is an interesting language and quite flexible. I am a scientist and not a game maker any more so it’s not quite setup for my purposes but I can easily live with using the main.draw sub being called once per frame. It would be nice to also this routine not to be forced to excecute repeatedly if programmers didn’t want it.
I found a matrix, complex and fft classes on the web, that I’m sure will work with a little tweaking. I’ve written my own graphics toolbox, and I’m ready to go. I’ve used @bortels font libraries … great.
Wish list
Double precision ( I assume single precision is implemented)
File reading and writing so that I can get data sets into and out of program
3 a proper debug output window.
And off course a way to create a standalone app on the iPad … Please.
There is nobody, anywhere, who is happy about removing project import/export, except maybe someone at Apple who is following guidelines and maybe doesn’t understand.
The situation won’t stay this way - TLL is appealing, and either they’ll succeed, or other means will need to be used to fix things (I know of at least two alternatives, only one of which involves jailbreaking your ipad). But better to not muddy the waters with that right now, I keep my fingers crossed that Apple will see that their “no downloaded code” is a poor fit for this situation.
The only reason I don’t update my Codea to 1.2.7 is the removal of email sharing. I use Codea passively, means most of the time just to look at what other people made with it, I can’t live without that feature. I don’t want to copy-n-paste hundreds of line of code from the web into Codea.
No downgrade here either… And 1.3 better be a darned sight better than 1.2.5 for me in order to upgrade…
I’m no coding wizard, so I mostly look at what others do and change their programs. Not having a nice way to import is a real downer. ( I of course realize 2LL has no real say in the matter… )
BTW, how does one turn a program into a .Codea ‘bundle’ for publishing on the web?
Yes, I’m madly going through the forums downloading all that code that I thought “Looks nice, might download later” before upgrading. But I will upgrade. I can get stuff onto my iPad by other means (not jailbroken) so it’s just a hassle.
One annoyance is that the .codea file format is currently defunct. So anything that has been shared as a .codea file should be reshared as flat files, sadly. (Bortels posts a script for extracting stuff from a .codea file sometime ago.)
One tiny upside to the sharing of ‘visible code’ is the ability to inspect the code (and/or copy bits) without having to open the encapsulated (‘boxed’) file in Codea.
Aside: I’m going crazy scrolling back and forth through all the projects I have stored in Codea. Which reminds me to hope that Codea 1.3 brings a better system for managing these (@Simeon has mentioned tags but I’d love to see an even more compact and old fashioned approach like say… a textual list?).
Further aside: How does everyone else manage this time-spent-scrolling issue?
setContext() is one of those boring-sounding but insanely useful things that will likely be used in 80% of the programs out there - so not upgrading is not a viable long-term solution.
You can use iExplorer to move files to/from the iPad, without jailbreaking it; if you jailbreak, you have more options (I like rsync, wirelessly). Note that the 5.01 jailbreak is untethered (yay), and doesn’t work on the ipad2 (boo).
That still leaves you stuck with .codea files nothing but codea will open - and I hope to have a couple of options there later today for people to use for the time being.
Codea Viewer export (who knows). @Simeon said he was almost done with it.
Tagging projects.
Renaming projects and editing project descriptions.
Sounds fairly reasonable to me. Who knows about the project tagging and Codea Viewer. @Simeon hasn’t commented on it in a while.
I think .codea import/export and any reasonable player are inseperable - until the first is resolved, I don’t expect to see the second.
We might see (and I’m not sure it’s a bad idea) a “Codea Demo”, free of course, with just the examples, and a read-only editor function - so people on the edge can look and try things and see performance and look at the code, but not actually do it.
Renaming and editing tabs too, sure.
But - that’s not “pretty huge”. Now - that could mean “of epic changness” or simply “lots of little things”. Dunno - I always worry that there are subtle differences in word choice between American English, English English, Aussie English, and what I think of as “Euro English”. “huge” to me means something big, something that has impact - while a bunch of small things would be a “comprehensive” change. Dunno. I know it’s silly reading a huge thread into two words, but it’s also fun, so meh.
