LiveCode Forums.

I asked one of our developers to look at cross-platform development tools for a major new interactive education project we are working on. He came back with a list that didn't include LiveCode. I then asked him to include LiveCode as one of the options. The new list had Livecode ranked 7th out of 8 and noted:

Pros:
1. Supports iOS & Android
2. Has some game development modules (sprite effects, etc.)

Cons:
1. Does not currently support web deployment though they have got funding to implement
it.
2. Does not seem to contain game development game modules (sprite effects, physics
engine, etc.).
3. Cannot use the code on other platforms if we want to migrate the app.
4. $2,000 / year

I'd be interested to know whether people here consider this a fair assessment. His first choice was Cocos2dx. The criteria for selection were:

1. Ability to write 1 code base and publish to iOS, Android & web
2. Be able to combine with native APIs & libraries if necessary (IAPs, SQL, etc.).
3. Run games smoothly
4. Possibly support multi-touch interaction (and fallbacks for web)
5. Quick compiling for multi-platform development (debugging).

Hi Russell,
I'm sure you're going to get plenty of feedback on this. LC supports iSO, Android, HTML5, Mac, Windows and Linux. You can absolutely write the code on a Mac or Windows and deploy to any of the others. LC does support multi-touch as well as other mobile capabilities. I don't write games but there are plenty of LC users that do. LC gives you the ability to write and test (debug) your code interactively as you are developing it. It is very fast. You'll need to check to LC on the license cost but it's closer to $500.

Something to add to your criteria would be the ease of learning the language. For that, you can't beat LC.

HTH,
Tom

Pros:
1. Supports iOS & Android
2. Has some game development modules (sprite effects, etc.)

Cons:
1. Does not currently support web deployment though they have got funding to implement
it.
2. Does not seem to contain game development game modules (sprite effects, physics
engine, etc.).
3. Cannot use the code on other platforms if we want to migrate the app.
4. $2,000 / year

I'd be interested to know whether people here consider this a fair assessment. His first choice was Cocos2dx. The criteria for selection were:

1. Ability to write 1 code base and publish to iOS, Android & web
2. Be able to combine with native APIs & libraries if necessary (IAPs, SQL, etc.).
3. Run games smoothly
4. Possibly support multi-touch interaction (and fallbacks for web)
5. Quick compiling for multi-platform development (debugging).

Hi Russell -

Tom covered pretty much anything I might hope to add here, but I'm curious about how Cons 3 and 4 were arrived at. If there's a communication weakness in the web taxonomy or content we should definitely clear that up. Like Tom said, one of the best things about LC is that you can move your work freely between Mac, Windows, and Linux, and deploy to any of seven platforms. And while there is a more expensive pricing option, the ~$500 Indy license is the best fit for most companies.

Hi Russell,
I think it should be mentioned that there is a free community edition. The big difference is that your code must be open source. You could spend your development time scripting/debugging on the community version then when you are ready to publish get the $500 licence to encrypt your app.

Here is an example of liveCode being used in interactive education;
https://livecode.com/eurotalk/
and Eurotalk's site
https://eurotalk.com/us/

Simon

Livecode's website makes it very difficult to quickly find the information you need. Its lack of clarity is probably one of the reasons we won't be choosing it.

For example:
(1) Where is the information about it being able to write once and deploy to web? (Double-checking as I wrote this, I found an out-of date note hidden away saying: "Web browser deployment (using HTML5) is coming later in 2015." So still none the wiser.

(2) Where are the links to professional apps that were developed using LiveCode? If there were any you'd think these be shown off proudly. Thought the LiveCode storeis might have that but it goes to a blank page.

-- thanks to Simon for the link to Eurotalk but we'd like to see more.

Also, where is the information about whether the stable release of the latest LiveCode has a physics engine?

Re. using code on other platforms, I think he meant other development platforms – Javascript could be re-used but LiveTalk couldn't.

Agreed, Russell, the site needs some tidying up. The Stories section was working a while back, but this morning I can confirm the media there isn't loading. Also, while there was an extensive page on the new HTML5 deployment option in development, at the moment that page doesn't appear to be linked into the main taxonomy.

I've reported those to the webmaster, so hopefully we'll see those taken care of next week.

Must be something about xplat tool vendors: trying the site for the OP's other choice, Cocos2dx, half the buttons in the main nav bar are completely unresponsive in both Firefox and Chrome.

Russell_Willis wrote:Livecode's website makes it very difficult to quickly find the information you need.....

My feelings exactly, every time I visit the website!

Russell_Willis wrote:......Its lack of clarity is probably one of the reasons we won't be choosing it.

Sad. Very sad.

Regards,
Sri

Hi Russell,
deployment to HTML5 was possible from August 2015 on, but it is still in development. You can test it with any of the later Developer Preview versions of Livecode 8 but I believe it will improve still considerably until the first stable release.

As in most similar cases, the correct answer is that everything depends on your project. I see Livecode as a quite universal software development environment; you can solve almost any problem with it and in most cases rather quickly; but Livecode is not a specialist software. For example for physics games you will find much better environments; but those environments are perhaps not very good with processing text or dealing with databases. So, if your emphasize is on physics games I would not recommend Livecode, but if you want to combine massive interactive slideshows with user quizzes, a poetry generator and a joke analyzer, bouncing dolls, 2d puzzles and interactive video lessons etc. Livecode should be at least among your top 3 choices. Also, if the project envisions that teachers / students can get involved in creating extensions to the project, Livecode is great. There is an open source community edition and Livecode is fairly easy to learn for novice programmers. So, it depends...

I looked at the cocos2d-x tutorial http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/201 ... Input.aspx and I think it seemed obscenely complicated. In Livecode you would handle the same thing with 2 lines of code, if I am not completely mistaken.

Best
Oliver

Thanks for this.

It's a shame the website is such a mess, especially as Livecode are hoping to get $2,000 out of developers, wheras things like Cocos2DX are free.

You would expect to see an up-to-date list of features and a list of apps produced with LiveCode. With Cocos we've been able to see and try out apps and confirm that it can do what we want, across the platforms we want.

It is a shame. I have always had a preference for LiveCode stemming from my Hypercard days, but it seems the team behind LiveCode (or at least the website) still can't get it together, despite all the funding.

Russell_Willis wrote:......With Cocos we've been able to see and try out apps and confirm that it can do what we want, across the platforms we want.

You could have done that with LiveCode Community Edition, couldn't you? (except iOS, which requires closed code)

Regards,
Sri

I'v made a professional application
Website: http://zcafe.weebly.com .
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmW2Svt ... V5S1Sjx7-L .

Here is a commercial app sold to universities and/or individuals, with thousands of users world-wide. This is a complex app that uses animation, interactive quizzes, movies and audio, livestreaming, AWS, a database backend, and much more:

http://www.thinkingstrings.com

Some courses have videos where you can see how the app looks and works. Try http://www.thinkingstrings.com/revealin ... religions/ for one.

The videos do not include some of the new features such as bookmarks, text hilighting, and student notes, but you can get the main ideas. Also, the videos are from the old Director version which has been replaced now by the LiveCode rewrite, but visually and behaviorally they are the same. The client found LiveCode to be superior to Director in many ways, not the least of which was development time and cost.

sritcp wrote:

Russell_Willis wrote:......With Cocos we've been able to see and try out apps and confirm that it can do what we want, across the platforms we want.

You could have done that with LiveCode Community Edition, couldn't you? (except iOS, which requires closed code)

Regards,
Sri

I assume Russell meant that on the Cocos website you can go to a menu called GAMES where you get a list of games developed with Cocos. You can easily try them out to understand what kind of things people have done with Cocos. The Livecode website has such a section, called STORIES, which is not working at this moment: https://livecode.com/livecode-stories/ but I am sure it is soon up and running again. From within the Livecode environment you can also go to a website with Sample Stacks called Live Code Share. http://livecodeshare.runrev.com/ I am not sure if it is still actively maintained, the newest entries are dated. The Livecode resources such as sample stacks, resource-centre, tutorials, lessons, academies, user comments on the dictionary etc. could be better organized. But in all fairness, Livecode has gone through a lot of changes, especially lately and it carries a lot of legacy baggage which is not easy to unify into a neat package.

Cocos is in my eyes a specialized environment for game development, and even just for a certain type of games. So if your project falls into this narrow frame that cocos caters for, you are probably better off with them. But if your use case expands, and you must for example analyze students text input, the story changes, then livecode might be worth another consideration.

Best
Oliver

okk wrote:Cocos is in my eyes a specialized environment for game development, and even just for a certain type of games. So if your project falls into this narrow frame that cocos caters for, you are probably better off with them. But if your use case expands, and you must for example analyze students text input, the story changes, then livecode might be worth another consideration.

Well said, Oliver.

Desktop OSes and web browsers are vastly different platforms, and when any tool advertises deployment to both it's helpful to examine exactly how that's done to better understand the scope of what's offered.

The only execution engine browsers commonly support is JavaScript, so any tool that advertises deployment to both desktop and web will at some point need to be using JavaScript for the web side of that.

I haven't worked with Cocos so I'm not familiar with its technical underpinnings, but most tools that offer both desktop and web deployment do so from fixed options pre-scripted, which the user can choose among as a sort of multiple choice way to deliver interactivity. While this can be very efficient for developing specific types of apps (indeed most of my career has been building application-specific authoring tools for clients using xTalk systems), by their nature they usually imply a limited set of options.

Other types of apps may require less generic types of interactions, for which the rich expressiveness of an open scripting language is far more efficient than trying to work within the confines of point-and-click systems.

But unless that scripting language is JavaScript, web deployment will require translating the code from whatever scripting language is used into the only scripting language a browser can understand. That is not a trivial undertaking, which is why so few tools even attempt it.

And given the vastly different roles of OS-native apps and web apps, it's rarely a mistake to step back now and then and carefully review requirements of a system to determine if deploying to both is truly necessary, or even desirable.

On mobile, for example, one of the fastest growing architectural models is a hybrid approach where an embedded browser object is used for certain functionality within an OS-native app that can take advantage of useful hardware options devices offer.

This is not limited to mobile. Desktop apps can provide the same scope of richness and integration with the host OS far more than a browser-constrained app can, and still provide HTTP support or even an embedded browser when those elements may be needed. In fact, for the last few years most of the desktop apps I've been building for clients do exactly that, downloading not just their data but even their UI and underlying code from servers, to deliver an experience that takes full advantage of an application environment dedicated to the task it supports while still providing all of the most valuable aspects of web development in terms of centralized code management, cloud storage of user data, and instant deployment.

What Russell_Willis means is that there is no showcase for livecode and he has a good point there. Recently i did some research on "Game Engines" because i wanted to start doing some game development, the first think i checked out was the showcase, and Cocos has an impressive one, some of the most popular games have been created with it.
The main advantage of livecode is its simplicity but when it comes to game development there are so many engines out there dedicated to game development that are MUCH simpler than livecode. Plus the absence of features like a physics engine leaves livecode out of the question when it comes to game dev. I have spend some time creating games with livecode and i must say it is a pain, but when it comes to application development it is superior to any other engine out there.