Andy you are the best. I hope Cocoon IO treats you well because you've helped me out a ton! In fact I wouldn't have become a paying customer if you hadn't helped me out in some really critical times so you can quote me on that one! I know it's not a lot of money in the big picture but I encourage anyone else to do the same.
I really hope things can be made well between Scirra and Cocoon IO. I'm afraid there might be some bad blood from the previous cocoon.js days. I was fairly new to C2 at the time and I tried things like Ejecta rather than get too deep into Cocoon which at the time I was hearing enough bad experiences to not feel compelled to go that route.. CocoonJS was officially supported.. at least they had a Cocoon export option at one time, but that eventually got dropped when Cordova became a viable option with iOS8's release.
Andy, the bug you mention with the scaling, is there a workaround that we as C2 developers could do?
— well said all around. I agree with your points. C2 is largely not at fault itself with the wrappers.
However it CAN be a problem and just knowing it might be a problem only makes debugging that much harder to know you're not barking up the wrong tree.. it's like mobile publishing is a 3 legged stool.. you have
1. C2/C3
2. Plugin Developer (cranberry, etc)
3. wrapper solution (xdk, cocoon ,etc)
1... is the least often problem, but it does update frequently and you never know if could unknowingly introduce some quirk. Andy pointed out a bug that is yet fixed. The can and do happen.. and just knowing they may happen means it always becomes a possibility in troubleshooting that can create even more troubleshooting time wasted..
2... is terrible.. because Ashley has said he doesn't want developers to be able to sell plugins in the store at any price because it could be expensive.. Sang Ki can't sustain himself off $3 plugins.. so what you do is get someone excited to make plugins for people then have to move on because there is no money in it.. and let's face it.. plugin development is not as fun as making games.. it's not our fault that C2 is only $130.. I will gladly pay $100 for a fully supported plugin for whatever service I need.. Hell Ashley should consider a pro license.. and i don't mean business.. i mean a pro license that adds high end functionality (Like a solid mobile publishing pipeline).. I'd easily pay $500 for C2 if it could offer me that.. or C3?
We're actually looking to make some plugins for our own needs and possibly sell them to professional C2 users.. but it won't be cheap and if someone doesn't want to pay the price we set we don't care. Anything less wouldn't be worth our time. We might even look at some kind of subscription / support plan. Since we will be using them ourselves. We're working on a web game and when we learned that C2 doesn't actually have any monetization options for web, we're having to come up with our own solutions. Eventually though mobile might become something else we try to expand into.
3... this is also really tough because it is obviously a living / changing thing and yes in time it will maybe settle down but that's no way to run a business either. Someone with C2 in mind needs to be overviewing the pipeline. .one of them.. to insure things are working.. and they need to make plugins that support the features you need.. Cocoon IO has been the best option overall because they MAKE THEIR OWN PLUGINS and can support those.. I've found that most of my cranberry plugins got replaced with official cocoon io plugins.. and yes.. we have found bugs.. but guess what? they fix them. with Cranberry it's way more uncertain..
- yes in my mind I see him having someone join and focus on publishing pipeline support.. plugin validation..
alternately, even if they just had someone who is there to help insure at least one publishing platform is tested and working. Making sure that C2 has plugins
- like i said.. he needs to offer a paid support system or something more professional.. even if just 100 developers had pro license support.. let's say we pay $50 a month.. that's $5000 a month to hire someone full time or even part time to keep a living / breathing person actively testing XDK / Cocoon IO issues and help identify issues. They could tell us "don't upgrade" when something is bad.. encourage us to use stable versions
why let 3rd party devs be responsible to give developers key things they need (video ads, analytic, etc) have Scirra make official (optional) plugins we can buy?