Codea 4 - Official Thread

@John: Great!

@John Looking forward very much to Codea 4. Remember you don’t have to have everything implemented to release the beta-I am a bit worried you will keep adding new features and delay a long time before making it available!

@piinthesky
The only hold up right now is getting the editor ready. Also considering if it needs to be a separate app (even if just for the beta) so that you can easily keep running 3.x projects without having to switch builds

Nice

if it needs to be a separate app (even if just for the beta)

if it’s a separate app then keep it separate so we don’t have to migrate twice

This sounds like great news. I was metal-openGL concerned. Also shows that the people behind Codea keep working on it.

I would imagine the ETA for Codea 4 to be out is a year away? (so May 2023?).

I would in particular welcome a very robust export to Xcode to recompile as I am seeing a lot of issues in Codea 3 regarding that, and I can’t see how you publish on the store an App without recompiling it.

a couple more things i wonder about, not trying to delay any development but we can’t pause sounds, will there be any improvements on the sounds system?

any plans to add video playback support? it would be ideal to be able to play videos in containable boxes as well as full screen

there were some posts about controller (external device) support, and @jfperusse gave us an easy way to use objc to add support but will it be built in to codea 4?

@Elias if it remains a single app then 3.x projects will still be supported

@skar
Sound system is improved with support for pausing, fading, seeking with potential for buses, ducking, filters etc… there’s also a waveform generator so you can make procedural sounds

I’ve got a visual debugger interface working in Codea 4. Technically it could work in Codea 3.x as well but be slow due to lack of support for OP_HALT which requires a regression to Lua 5.3 at the moment

https://twitter.com/johntwolives/status/1520279365640388608?s=21&t=FTtgEFePubiadVkwGGbiqA

I’m really looking forward to Codea 4, it really looks amazing!

It would be great if it could be its own separate app (or if you could somehow keep the Codea 3 runtime as an option). Otherwise, it might be a little intimidating to update as projects could break - especially if it is still in beta and going back to the AppStore version might be difficult or require to migrate back to the old API. I don’t know, though, how easily we can transfer projects and e.g. the documents-folder from one app to another.

I agree with @skar on the sound system. As far as I know, ‘pan’ doesn’t work for sounds that are already playing and it’s not really transparent how many sounds can be played at the same time. Sometimes, if there are only a few sounds playing, new ones are simply ignored. It would be great if that could be improved some time in the future.

Anyway, this really looks to be the biggest step forward for Codea and I can’t wait to give it a try!

Oh, if that’s the case then a single app might allow for easier migration as all assets and projects are already there. But both approaches seem sensible to me.

Sneak peak into some of the progress on Codea 4.x

https://twitter.com/johntwolives/status/1523524379237576705?s=21&t=5-blkEjgUh_4kWOqPyLudQ

Beta is coming along and will be putting it out there soon hopefully

I’ve started work on a tutorial series for Codea 4 as well:

https://github.com/JohnTM/Codea4-Docs/tree/main/docs/source/code/Examples/How%20to%20Codea

@John - just scanned through your examples for 4 and, I’m assuming there’s more to come, they are intriguing - looks like you are setting up separate windows for parameters etc and shaders look good. Is there a new Codea icon on view in there?

Only 1 suggestion, not going into some of the Lua text facilities, but a simple example of concatenation of text to text and text to variable (in the text example) would be useful.

Thanks, will keep looking through these and post any ideas I have.

@Bri_G Yes there is more planned, I’ve only just started sketching out what I want to have. There are a lot of potential topics and concepts to cover

Not sure what you mean by text concatenation, are you referring to the Dialogue project?

@John - nothing so sophisticated, I just meant the addition/extension of strings. Like :


Foo = 21

print("Foo is equal to : "..Foo)

Showing the ability to build strings and incorporate values. Added to Hello.lua .

p.s. apologies if the code formatting doesn’t work, wrote this on my Android phone.

Oh I get what you mean :slight_smile:

Would it be possible to get periodic updates on Codea 4 progress (weekly or bi-weekly)? Nothing too involved, no pressure, just some idea of how things are going, that it is progressing, and that a beta delivery is getting closer.

Chomping at the bit here for a folder-file structure, to make large project management more feasible

@blacatena
I’ll give it a shot!

@Simeon is working on a project quicklaunch title screen (which will work on Mac and iOS) and the idea is to standardise and improve document management

Currently when you make a project you need to save it with a name in a particular location (usually documents). We’re looking at adopting a similar model to other apps where you can just create a new unnamed project, which will stay open in a separate document window until you want to save it. If you try to close it without saving you will be prompted.

I could pull the trigger on a beta pretty much now but I feel like there are a lot of rough edges (the folder navigation looks great but not all the functionality for name/delete/move is in yet) and the avalanche of bug reports might be difficult to manage

As an additional note, the multi-window code editing would allow you to quickly open and edit a dependency at the same time as your current project (or at least quickly switch between them). It could also allow us to have code open at the same time as a running project. This of course will be limited to screen space as this is at a premium

@John, do you think we would be able to create an online multiplayer server when Codea 4 comes out?