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Moai supports Chrome...and iOS and Android and Windows and Mac: http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/ It's cool to see Lua in the browser, yes, but it's bee

Moai supports Chrome...and iOS and Android and Windows and Mac: http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/ It's cool to see Lua in the browser, yes, but it's been there for a while already. I also am skeptical about LÖVE (what Aroma's based on) being ready for commercial games. I've asked LÖVE supporters what commercial games were built on that platform, and they came up completely empty. Bringing a game to release quality tends to find all of the corners of a library that are not production-ready. Moai has a number of serious users, though, including Double Fine.

kevingadd 14y ago
I don't think it makes sense to attribute any special amount of quality to Moai; IIRC only one commercial-quality game (Crimson Steam Pirates) has been released in it. DFA will count once it's out, I guess, but that's a ways away. Having used Moai myself I wouldn't really call it commercial quality. The documentation is poor, the code is cryptic, and it tends to crash or do strange things instead of report errors. It also fails to abstract out hardware limitations or notify you of them (for example, it'll let you use 4Kx4K textures and then when you run on a machine with a 2Kx2K limit, Moai just falls over instead of providing clear error feedback or scaling-down the texture.)
- pygy_ 14y ago
  > only one commercial-quality game (Crimson Steam Pirates) has been released in it. DFA will count once it's out, I guess, but that's a ways away. Add Wolf Toss, and the WIP Shadowrun Returns. Both DFA [Doublefine Adventure] and Shadowrun should be done by the end of the year. Regarding the bugs, I'm sure tat they'd be happy to discuss them, but it's night time in Seattle now. You can drop a line at their forums (http://getmoai.com/forums http://getmoai.com/forums) or the Github bug tracker (https://github.com/moai/moai-dev/issues https://github.com/moai/moai-dev/issues). For the documentation, it is constantly improving. The API docs still have weak points, but the high level overview and the (now partly annotated) examples go a long way. You may want to check these pages: Overview of the runtime: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Moai_Runtime http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Moai_Runtime More details: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part_One http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part... http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part_Two http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part... Annotations of the examples: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Samples_Guide http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Samples_Gui... TOC: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=MoaiSDK http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=MoaiSDK
- seclorum 14y ago
  I'm using MOAI professionally, and none of your points are of any concern so far .. we've definitely been very productive with MOAI, and sure - the documentation needs work, but for a 1.0 release, MOAI packs an immensely powerful punch. If you're a pro mobile developer, you can't afford to not investigate MOAI - its an extremely powerful tool that is going to be used for more and more releases .. (and yes it already has NaCL support - as well as Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, Android .. and LINUX host support too..)
- SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  I haven't used Moai myself; that's good information. Thanks. By the time Moai was released, I had already created my own Moai-equivalent C/C++/Lua framework. I've written a game on it already, and one other developer (a company I used to work with who asked for access) is using it, but I haven't released it to the public. When I discovered Moai I was a bit skeptical about it; they've written all their Lua bindings by hand, which isn't terrible, but they're bound to Lua 5.0...meaning that you can't drop in LuaJIT and have scripts run 3x-100x faster. Since I had my own library already, I decided not to switch. And their model seems to be (like löve) that you have a monolithic build that just runs Lua code, whereas I prefer keeping the C++ build process around so I can drop into C or C++ easily, adding or removing modules as I need them. For instance it appears they have TWO 2d physics engines as part of the build, along with lots of other libraries that I may or may not need, resulting in 6+ megabytes of binary, while mine comes in comfortably under 2Mb. Auto-generating Lua bindings makes this easier as well -- if I need to add another library, I just drop it in and run my binding generation script; other than adding any new source files to the various projects, that's it. But strictly considering löve vs. Moai, I still have to advise people to lean toward Moai.
Jimmie 14y ago
Although it's freeware, mari0 was made with LÖVE and it is pretty solid. http://stabyourself.net/mari0/ http://stabyourself.net/mari0/ It made HN a while ago, link to discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3665859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3665859
- SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  Looks nice. The problem is, while a high-quality freeware game like mari0 does mean that LÖVE does meet the minimum feature set you'd need for a game, it doesn't mean it has the tools or widgets or features you'd need in a commercial game. For example, does the game render and perform well on all target platforms? For a freeware game, if it doesn't work on some video card, so what. For a commercial game, it means support headaches, lost revenues, and bad reviews and/or user comments. For more examples, see this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/love2d/comments/q0oc1/where_has_love2d_been_used/c3vhc3f?context=2 http://www.reddit.com/r/love2d/comments/q0oc1/where_has_love...
seclorum 14y ago
MOAI also (now) supports Linux. So, you have exactly one set of code to run on MacOSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.
ernesth 14y ago
Why do all löve articles get spammed about moai here? Apart from lua, they have nothing in common, different target, different goal. Both can be successful in their own niche. I use löve for teaching, there is no way I would have considered moai for a first application of my algorithmic course! And frankly, I do not care about "serious users".
- SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  The hook was that it was a "Native Game Client Powered by Lua". If you don't care about serious users, then you're free to choose appropriately. A lot of people do use löve; they must all have their reasons. I don't see how Moai is not relevant to this discussion, though. People clicking on the comments may be considering writing a serious game; if not, they can play with löve and have fun, but if they are, I wanted to warn them about what I'd found.

kevingadd 14y ago

I don't think it makes sense to attribute any special amount of quality to Moai; IIRC only one commercial-quality game (Crimson Steam Pirates) has been released in it. DFA will count once it's out, I guess, but that's a ways away. Having used Moai myself I wouldn't really call it commercial quality. The documentation is poor, the code is cryptic, and it tends to crash or do strange things instead of report errors. It also fails to abstract out hardware limitations or notify you of them (for example, it'll let you use 4Kx4K textures and then when you run on a machine with a 2Kx2K limit, Moai just falls over instead of providing clear error feedback or scaling-down the texture.)

pygy_ 14y ago
> only one commercial-quality game (Crimson Steam Pirates) has been released in it. DFA will count once it's out, I guess, but that's a ways away. Add Wolf Toss, and the WIP Shadowrun Returns. Both DFA [Doublefine Adventure] and Shadowrun should be done by the end of the year. Regarding the bugs, I'm sure tat they'd be happy to discuss them, but it's night time in Seattle now. You can drop a line at their forums (http://getmoai.com/forums http://getmoai.com/forums) or the Github bug tracker (https://github.com/moai/moai-dev/issues https://github.com/moai/moai-dev/issues). For the documentation, it is constantly improving. The API docs still have weak points, but the high level overview and the (now partly annotated) examples go a long way. You may want to check these pages: Overview of the runtime: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Moai_Runtime http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Moai_Runtime More details: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part_One http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part... http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part_Two http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Basics_Part... Annotations of the examples: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Samples_Guide http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=Moai_SDK_Samples_Gui... TOC: http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=MoaiSDK http://getmoai.com/wiki/index.php?title=MoaiSDK
seclorum 14y ago
I'm using MOAI professionally, and none of your points are of any concern so far .. we've definitely been very productive with MOAI, and sure - the documentation needs work, but for a 1.0 release, MOAI packs an immensely powerful punch. If you're a pro mobile developer, you can't afford to not investigate MOAI - its an extremely powerful tool that is going to be used for more and more releases .. (and yes it already has NaCL support - as well as Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, Android .. and LINUX host support too..)
SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
I haven't used Moai myself; that's good information. Thanks. By the time Moai was released, I had already created my own Moai-equivalent C/C++/Lua framework. I've written a game on it already, and one other developer (a company I used to work with who asked for access) is using it, but I haven't released it to the public. When I discovered Moai I was a bit skeptical about it; they've written all their Lua bindings by hand, which isn't terrible, but they're bound to Lua 5.0...meaning that you can't drop in LuaJIT and have scripts run 3x-100x faster. Since I had my own library already, I decided not to switch. And their model seems to be (like löve) that you have a monolithic build that just runs Lua code, whereas I prefer keeping the C++ build process around so I can drop into C or C++ easily, adding or removing modules as I need them. For instance it appears they have TWO 2d physics engines as part of the build, along with lots of other libraries that I may or may not need, resulting in 6+ megabytes of binary, while mine comes in comfortably under 2Mb. Auto-generating Lua bindings makes this easier as well -- if I need to add another library, I just drop it in and run my binding generation script; other than adding any new source files to the various projects, that's it. But strictly considering löve vs. Moai, I still have to advise people to lean toward Moai.

Jimmie 14y ago

Although it's freeware, mari0 was made with LÖVE and it is pretty solid. http://stabyourself.net/mari0/ http://stabyourself.net/mari0/ It made HN a while ago, link to discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3665859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3665859

SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
Looks nice. The problem is, while a high-quality freeware game like mari0 does mean that LÖVE does meet the minimum feature set you'd need for a game, it doesn't mean it has the tools or widgets or features you'd need in a commercial game. For example, does the game render and perform well on all target platforms? For a freeware game, if it doesn't work on some video card, so what. For a commercial game, it means support headaches, lost revenues, and bad reviews and/or user comments. For more examples, see this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/love2d/comments/q0oc1/where_has_love2d_been_used/c3vhc3f?context=2 http://www.reddit.com/r/love2d/comments/q0oc1/where_has_love...

seclorum 14y ago

MOAI also (now) supports Linux. So, you have exactly one set of code to run on MacOSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.

ernesth 14y ago

Why do all löve articles get spammed about moai here? Apart from lua, they have nothing in common, different target, different goal. Both can be successful in their own niche. I use löve for teaching, there is no way I would have considered moai for a first application of my algorithmic course! And frankly, I do not care about "serious users".

SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
The hook was that it was a "Native Game Client Powered by Lua". If you don't care about serious users, then you're free to choose appropriately. A lot of people do use löve; they must all have their reasons. I don't see how Moai is not relevant to this discussion, though. People clicking on the comments may be considering writing a serious game; if not, they can play with löve and have fun, but if they are, I wanted to warn them about what I'd found.