I’m really eager to see Codea 4, particularly for the new hierarchy structure. Right now using Tabs is a big headache since i’m the type of coder that likes to go back and forth between files and make sure my parent/child relationships are correct. Maybe there’s two things i’d like to see, a tree view of my files and also the ability to put files side by side (panes). As a minor note, it’s a bit annoying that currently as i scroll down my files the Tabs on top disappear and i have to scroll up to get them to come up again. Will these workflow obstacles be changed with Codea 4’s hierarchy? When will we get our first look and hands on of 4?
P.S. it seems that the tabs disappearing and having to scroll up is an issue when using the Apple Pencil and small keyboard
the fact that tabs have to be in define-before-reference order (sometimes) makes reordering tabs tricky. i wonder how I’d feel putting all the declarations of classes (or whatever) first …
Are there any updates on Codea 4? I’m especially curious about how shaders will be handled. I’ve read in some thread that the current way of using mesh might still work in the future to keep compatibility, but I’d like to know whether this also applies to shaders or whether they have to be rewritten entirely.
@Elias Shaders are a tough one. At this point I believe they will need to be re-written
However the plan is to keep the legacy runtime around so old projects can continue to be run, but creating new projects uses the new runtime by default. @John and I have talked about cross-compiling old shader code in order to support it, but it feels like a fair bit of work when we could just support legacy projects entirely
@Simeon Thanks for your answer! An issue with the legacy runtime could be that OpenGL might be dropped by Apple at some point in the not too distant future as it has been deprecated for some time now.
Would converting shaders to the new runtime be difficult or are the changes rather moderate?
Will mesh remain usable? I remember reading in some post that there will be changes to how shaders are applied to materials in order to have the same procedure for Craft projects and “regular” projects, but that mesh might still work. Is this still up-to-date or might there be changes to this as well?
Lastly, as @skar asked in the initial post, I’d be interested in whether you already have an idea when we might be able to try out Codea 4. Do you have an approximate schedule (e.g. could it be this year)?