To be cocos2d-x or not to be? [new to cocos2d-x]

Hi there,
I started to develop my first animated books app with dragonfire sdk, which hides lots of the apple world/distribution line and runs on WIndows PC but lacks on Android developpment. So I am looking for a SDK where my (limited) C++ skills and current app can be (re)used .
This means also I have completely ignorant of the underlying Xcode and/or compiling/makefiles issues.

I’ve started to look for the tutorial (in particular the recent videos (superracoon?) to have cocos2d on Mac for both Xcode and Eclipse) and it started to frighten me since I have no idea of what those .m or .mm file mights do and what their relation to my .cpp and .h files ?
My questions would be:

  • where can i find the doc on the classes APi?
    my apps will be animated books i.e each page of my comic(s) will be shown (here i understand to be a “scene” per cocos2d-x ) and in each screen, sprites will be moving (CCCaddsprite for the scene as far as I could tell) , sound played and text shown (bitmap or ttf fonts) and transition to next page done. I guess it’s piece of cake for cocos (I’ve seen some transition videos which have interested me) but I somehow could not find in the documentation whether that will bne possible especially the memory management side since i wanna make sure that between each scene memory gets flushed or scenes/sprites gets linked to different .png for that comic page otherwise with 30-40 full screen .png, iphone memory will die.

~~can I develop every thing on 1 machine and then test on real devices relatively easily? in particular do I get a mobileprovisio file to put in itune for the iphone tests when I am under PC?
~~I currently own a Windows PC . I understand I will need to buy a MAC to distribute to the Apple Appstore
Can I do the previous step on the MAC also for android? that’s my key question since I will need to invest in a MAC, I want to determine if I buy a “cheap” second hand MAC, do nothing with it except the signing for the distribution i.e I do every thing on my PC or whether I need to buy a “expensive” MAC and then develop,debug and distribute from it , meaning investing time also?
maybe I should give it a try from my current PC and see whether I can port my current app…there is probably no magic solutions ^^
thanks for reading and attempting to provide me with some hints/feedbacks
Lefla

Hi.

As far as I know you will need a Mac in order to compile for iPhone. It means you will need a Mac to generate the binaries and then be able to make tests on real devices.

I don’t have a Mac too and I’m thinking about in either to buy an inexpensive Mac mini or to build a hackintosh because we can develop on a PC running Linux or Windows and just use Mac for generating iPhone binaries.

The other way is perfectly possible: develop for both iPhone and Android in a Mac. I’m not sure whether you can generate binaries for Windows.

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thanks for your reply. binaries for windows are less an issue for me atm/ I’d like to address only mobile devices to begin with, although animated comics for windows maybe an idea I did not think of…I guess I’ll have to go for a MAC sigh which means plenty of learning curve ahead

You can develop for android in windows or mac.
You can develop for iPhone only on mac.

Use cocos2d-x to develop application in Win32 version. When you feel confident on the codes, purchase Mac mini and copy all the codes to run in Mac environment.

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I am using cocos2d-x software only on a PC and deploying to my iPhone. If I had an android device I could do the same thing with no code changes. I am using http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/ which is discussed in another forum here.

It used to be that you could submit to iTunes with the PC also but that changed about 6 months ago, not sure if Marmalade has figured out how to submit with a PC again. In either case, you can develop for the iPhone and Android (and other platforms) entirely on a PC using Visual Studio. You may need a mac to submit to iTunes or you can have someone do it for you.

thanks for the replies, it seems reasonable to go on with my PC and DragonFire right now, gain some experience in parallel with cocos2d and see later how and which MAC to buy to get it on the appstore… Waiting may be wiser especially since I am not sure yet whether Apple is going to accept animated comics on the appstore and/or whether they will filter based on quality of comic content irrespective of app code functionalities….
can anyone point me to whre the documentation for the calsses are? do I have to look in cocos2d or is it stored within cocos2d-x download?
thanks

You can read both online (from http://www.cocos2d-x.org/embedded/cocos2d-x/classes.html) or offline.

In order to read docs offline you need to generate them using doxygen (http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/download.html).

Inside your

/doxygen

folder you will find a file named

doxygen.cocos2d-x.

This file is the configuration file needed by doxygen.

It will create a folder named html under

/doxygen.

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Somehow I could find it. many thanks indeed.
Regards,

Oh, this remind me to update the online document now, it’s still v0.9.0.

Done! Update to v0.9.1, interface descriptions of CCFileUtils, CCLuaScriptModule is added.

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Hi All,

I am trying to develop an animated App using Cocos-2Dx .

My app will be animated books i.e each page of my comic(s) will be shown.

Kindly help me with the source code.

Thanks,Bharat.

@bharat_zanwar - Nobody can give you source code that does exactly what you want. Perhaps yo can find something by googling.

I’d recommend that you start with concepts from the Wiki.

@slackmoehrle :Thankyou for your reply.

Could you please guide me to start up with this mini project.

I request you to please guide me.

Thanks,
Bharat.

I used this guide for eclipse:
http://www.cocos2d-x.org/wiki/How_to_Build_an_Android_Project_with_Eclipse

I write my own (in Swedish, maybe you can use google to translate it)

@Knight81 - The link to the wiki should work great!