As Tim Schafer postet a movie about how they are going to use MOAI in their latest game. So I had to have a closer look at it. A few months back I already once noticed MOAI but I didn't care much about it. Nor did I have a closer look at it. Now that this changed here are my first thoughts on it.
MOAI is primarly intended for 2D mobile game development. But it's also possible to develop and distribute Windows and Mac games with a Linux port soon to follow. At least that's what their Website tells us. Mostly as a user of MOAI you code using LUA which is a pretty neat programming language. Overall it looks like a fast multi-platform 2D game development environment.
Zipline Games is the company behind MOAI. They make money from selling Games and Cloud Services (which MOAI fully integrates with). I especially like the Cloud stuff as that's definitely something I would want to use in my games.
My biggest problem with MOAI is the currently missing Linux support. As I develop my private projects solely on Linux (Ubuntu) I can't do much right now. The only possibility is to build the Linux part yourself from the Linux branch. But last time I checked they said it will be integrated soon. So I'm waiting for that.
Right now I mostly use libGDX which offers similar things except for iOS support (which they work on) and Cloud integration. Otherwise they seem very similar. But cloud for me would be a big plus and I would move my development efforts to MOAI with proper Linux support. I hope that's gonna be released soon.
Agree, linux missing support is my only concern.
ReplyDeleteI would have switched to moai months ago but I really hate using wine and cmd to run my scripts.
I'm still curious about Qt 5.0 QML.
I've tried coding a few test games and it's a pleasure to work with (and with their planned support for more platforms it may become the definitive framework).
It lacks a proper integration with physics engine and other commodities we grow used to, though: it's not exactly directed to game developers like MOAI is.
QT 5 (and QML) seems great. Wouldn't use it directly for games, besides very simple ones. But definitely a good thing for fancy multi-platform tools. Right now my favorite non-MS (WPF) UI-Toolkit.
DeleteGideros is a nice alternative and has linux support. You're right I would of been on Moai a long time ago, but since then I found Gideros and rather like it.
ReplyDeletethx, didn't know about that one. Looks promissing but doesn't seem to deploy to desktop platforms. Shame as the IDE runs there anyways. So why not deploy there as well. Maybe in the future ..
Delete