Today we proudly release Felgo SDK version 1.3. Since the last release we added a lot: a new demo game together with a Cocos2d comparison, particle editor improvements and new components & bug fixes that originated from our community. We want to shorten your waiting time for the latest fixes and features, which is the reason why we will soon add daily builds for users on a Pro Plan.
So let’s dive into the benefits in more detail without further ado:
Cocos2d Comparison from Ray Wenderlich Tutorial
We love Cocos2d. In fact, our development team has used Cocos2d-iphone since November 2009, and we now embrace Cocos2d-x as our underlying rendering technology to get the maximum performance across all platforms. However, working with C++ for game logic requires a multitude of development time and source code compared with scripting languages. To prove how big the difference is, we implemented the popular Cocos2d ninja game from Ray Wenderlich’s excellent website with Felgo. Ray’s tutorial can be found here: How To Make A Simple iPhone Game with Cocos2d. For the very same game, you can save more than 60% of source code with Felgo and its programming languages QML and JavaScript compared with the C++ or Objective-C version! The whole game implemented in QML takes only 150 lines of code, compared with 369 in C++, so you can imagine how big the difference may get for larger projects. The game is still running at solid 60 fps on mobile devices because only the game logic is written in JavaScript, whereas the Felgo components are still written in C++.
You can find the source code of the game and also the C++ version as a comparison here.
Particle Editor Improvements
As we announced in the last post, we improved the Particle Editor to make it even easier to work with: You can now create own particle effects and export them as JSON files to use them within your own games. As it is cross-platform, designing and tweaking effects is not only possible on your desktop, but also on your mobile while you are on the go. We were using the editor to create 20 pre-built effects which can serve as a starting point. With more than 50 particle textures available, the possibilities to create new stunning effects are endless. We are looking forward to seeing many cool particle effects in your Felgo games! The source code of the editor is publicly available here.
Community Feedback Integrations
We listen to our developer community carefully and highly value feedback, bug reports and feature requests. Usually we are able to provide a bug fix within a couple of hours, and we give our best to answer any support questions in the forums within hours! You can see which fixes were added in this release in the changelog. To improve our customer support even further, we will soon add the option of daily build access for our Pro users. This has the huge advantage that you immediately get access to our additions from your requests, but also to test-drive brand-new features we are currently working on. So there’s no need to wait for an upcoming official update release – instead you can use it right away.
First Upgrade for Free Users
This is the third update and thus our customers on the Free Plan are able to update to version 1.1. Follow our update guide to see how you can get it. If you want to have access to the latest version and daily builds, extended support and publishing for Android & iOS, upgrade to the Pro Plan and save 50% with our Early Bird license. The early bird discount is only available until the 31st of March, so hurry up!
We hope you have as much fun with the update as we already had developing it. 😉
(The screenshots were put into the device images with Breezi PlaceIt)
