we are developing a game using Marmalade SDK and Cocos2d-x version 1.0.1-x-0.13.0 beta (2012-03-29).
At the time we started working on the game, this version of Cocos2d-x was the only one to include marmalade platform support, so it was a forced choice, but currently it seems that also cocos2d-2.1beta3-x-2.1.0 has added the support for marmalade.
Now we are trying to evaluate if it is worth to replace in our project the old version of cocos2d-x with the newer one and I’d appreciate the point of view of someone more expert on the following questions:
- will cocos2d-x 2 leave unsupported many devices which are supported by Marmalade (eg Bada, BlackBerry etc)?
- should we expect huge changes in the API doing the migration?
- I see that cocos2d-x has a better approach to support multi resolution (see here), what are the other pros to switch to cocos2d-x 2?
Also if you have any other useful insight to share on that matter, we would greatly appreciate that.
Thank you in advance
Regarding devices, the most notable info is that: Cocos2d-x 2.0 supports OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 is no longer supported.
This could be a problem maybe some time ago, but now it is not a big issue – the new gen devices are well covered. We checked on the wikipedia page about OpenGL ES and realized that the devices we want to support (via Marmalade) are compatible.
We also downloaded Cocos2d-x 2.1beta3 (which includes the support for Marmalade) and seems already pretty complete and good to go.
Furthermore the migration guide of Cocos2d-x (find it here) seems a pretty complete guide and it doesn’t also seem a dramatic job to do.
That said, our game is in a state which is advanced enough to discourage us to face the port, because really in our case the most important advantage would have been the better multi-resolution management.
In fact we are not going to implement feaures that would leverage OpenGL ES 2.0 and we solved the multi-resolution with a homemade solution, so… well we’ll use Cocos2d-x 2.1 for the next project.
I hope this info can be useful for someone else and please feel free to correct me or add additional knowledge – we’re not expert and this comes from personal research.