This is an update to the Mobile Game Engine Popularity Index I published 2.5 months ago.
Game Engine Popularity on Stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow tag popularity
Since November’s chart I made sure the tags I’m most interested in (cocos2d-iphone, cocos2d-x, sprite-kit) were properly applied to all questions.
Furthermore I update at least the past 6 months for each tag, which caused the graph to change noticeably. This may be due to policing the site, where users remove tags or retag questions. The net result is that there are now recent months with fewer questions for some engines compared to November’s chart. In particular this flattened the up-down curve of cocos2d-iphone. Continue reading »
Topics: Overall interest in cocos2d is waning. Unity and libgdx fighting for 1st place. Sprite Kit skyrocketing from day one.
This sums it up. Now for the details. Since my last game engine popularity measurement I tried to improve and streamline the process.
Game Engine Popularity on Stackoverflow.com
For stackoverflow.com data I’m searching for tagged questions created in a specific month. The search query looks like this:
[cocos2d-x] is:question created:2013-11
I repeated this for every tag for every month as far back as there were questions with the given tag. Continue reading »
With yesterday’s release of iOS 7 and hence Sprite Kit, many cocos2d developers will face this question sooner or later: switch to Sprite Kit or Kobold Kit or stick with cocos2d-iphone or perhaps move on to cocos2d-x?
I’ll give you some guidance and things to consider …
Sprite Kit / Kobold Kit
Sprite Kit made quite the splash. There are new tutorials coming out by the minute. Two books will be available within days after release. Several high profile tutorial & starterkit authors have jumped on the bandwagon. Tool developers are hard at work adding Sprite Kit support. Instructors are already offering new mobile game development courses based on Sprite Kit. Heck I even started a new game engine based on Sprite Kit: Kobold Kit.
With almost everyone jumping ship, it seems a safe bet to jump ship, too. You’re guaranteed to get excellent documentation from Apple, plus a stability of the framework until at least iOS 7.1 and even then Apple is known to carry on supporting deprecated methods for several versions. It’s easy to learn, and once learned you won’t be thrown off guard by new releases. And the developer community will soon surpass that of cocos2d-iphone. Continue reading »
I’m looking for a good Text Editor for Mac OS X that supports Lua (preferably without installing any additional files). And I also want the editor to support autocomplete (aka code completion) for the Lua language, as well as being able to extend the autocomplete keywords.
Much to my dismay this narrowed down the field quite a bit. Therefore I created this list with short (and subjective) reviews of Text Editors for Mac OS X which you may find a good extension to Wikipedia’s Comparison of text editors.
But first, I want to be sure we’re all on the same level when we talk about the autocomplete feature. This Qt Creator video with Thorbjørn Lindeijer (of Tiled Map Editor fame) shows you what this feature is all about (beginning at 0:15).
I wanted to find the text editor for Lua that suits my needs. Since there are so many text editors, I quickly dismissed those editors that didn’t support autocomplete. And those whose Lua support needs to be installed manually also took a backseat rather quickly. By all means: please do correct me where I’m wrong, inaccurate, etc. I’m also open to discussing the inception of a flame war, if deemed helpful. 
This Kobold2D FAQ article explains the difference between Corona SDK and iPhone Wax library, and evaluates the existing and future options for Lua scripting in Kobold2D.
