Gideros Mobile

CREATE AMAZING GAMES FOR MANY PLATFORMS WITH LUA

Why Choose Gideros?

Gideros is free and open source and provides the cross-platform technology to create amazing games. In a couple of hours, you’ll find yourself building and running your next great game.

Some Benefits of Gideros

It's FREE

Gideros is FREE and Open Source and there are no limitations to developing and publishing apps.

Instant testing

While developing your game, it can be tested on a real device through Wifi in only 1 second – you don’t waste your time with an export or deploy process.

Native speed

Developed on top of C/C++ and OpenGL, your game runs at native speed and fully utilizes the power of CPUs and GPUs underneath.

Plugins

You can easily extend the core with plugins. Import your existing (C, C++, Java or Obj-C) code, bind to Lua and interpret them directly. Dozens of open-source plugins are already developed and ready to use.

Clean OOP approach

Gideros provides its own class system with all the basic OOP standards, enabling you to write clean and reusable code for any of your future games.

Full dev set

Get everything you need from the start, including lightweight IDE, players for Desktop and devices, Texture packer, Font Creator and there are also lots of 3rd party tools.

Fast development

Easy learning curve, instant testing, OOP coding practices and ability to create needed custom plugins reduces the development time. And because of reusable code, each your next app will be developed even faster.

Crossplatform

Apart from supporting multiple platforms, Gideros also provides automatic screen scaling and automatic selecting of proper image resolution, which makes supporting different screen resolutions and creating universal projects an easy task.

Plus

GLSL Shaders, Physics (LiquidFun), Meshes, Particles, Texturepacks, Tilemaps, Blend modes, Stencil, IAP/Ads, JSON, Skeletal animations (Spine/Dragonbones), Sockets & real-time multiplayer (PhotonCloud/Noobhub), plenty of other plugins built-in, Instant on-device testing, True Multithreading, Various Lua enhancements, Facebook Instant Games support, Unique async calls system, Built-in Profiler, Built-in Debugger, Full assets encryption, Offline builds, ...

Platforms you can export to

Android

Export generic Android project for Eclipse or Android Studio or export directly from Gideros Studio. Supporting also Google Play specific APIs and support other stores as OUYA, Amazon, SlideMe and many more.

iOS

Everything you need to make a game on iOS or AppleTV including, Ads, In app purchases and many other plugins available with additional functionality.

Windows Phone

Exporting Visual Studio solution that could be build and submitted to Windows Store directly.

MacOSX

Export apps to MacOS appstore or simple executables for Mac.

Windows

Exporting simple window .exe executable to create installer and submit to stores or distribute through your own channels.

Windows RT

Exporting Visual Studio solution to build and submit Windows Appstore apps.

Simple code examples

1. Display an image

To display an image, we first create a Texture object by providing path to the image file and optional boolean parameter which indicates if the image should be filtered (anti-aliased).

Then we create a Bitmap object, position it at some coordinate (default are 0,0) and add it to the stage to be rendered.

local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
bmp:setPosition(100, 100)
stage:addChild(bmp)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/jqUDqCWKFN4brh7E1gLKTfMvPYETV0Bz

2. Display some text

To display text, we first need to create a Font object, in this case we will use TTFont. We provide path to the font file, size of the text and optional boolean parameter which indicates if the font should be filtered (anti-aliased).

Then we create a TextField object by passing Font object and the text we want to display.

After that we simply set position of the text and add it to the stage to be rendered.

local tahomaFont = TTFont.new("tahoma.ttf", 50, true)
local text = TextField.new(tahomaFont, "Hello World!!!")
text:setPosition(100, 100)
stage:addChild(text)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/sxsdK7tCjiqUVg4nzWzRSoCA17wN8PLJ#

3. Draw shapes

We can also draw arbitrary shapes.

To accomplish that, we need to create a Shape object and set its fill and line styles.

We will use a solid red color for the fill style and 5px width blue line with alpha set to 1 (or full opacity).

Then we can begin drawing arbitrary shapes and once we're done, we simply set position of the shape and add it to the stage to be rendered.

local shape = Shape.new()
shape:setFillStyle(Shape.SOLID, 0xff0000)
shape:setLineStyle(5, 0x0000ff, 1)
shape:beginPath()
shape:moveTo(0,0)
shape:lineTo(0, 100)
shape:lineTo(100, 100)
shape:lineTo(100, 0)
shape:lineTo(0, 0)
shape:endPath()
shape:setPosition(200, 100)
stage:addChild(shape)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/Jq5duuCPvD8g0CuEtZ0QJwwRzeMhoIYx

4. Groups or layers

We can use Sprite objects to group other objects (or separate them in different layers) as images, texts and shapes.

To do that, we simply create a Sprite object and add other objects as its child.

After that we can manipulate the whole group easily, as for example, changing position of all elements by simply changing the position of the parent.

And of course as usual, we add it to the stage to be rendered.

local container = Sprite.new()

local ball1 = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
ball1:setAnchorPoint(0.5, 0.5)
ball1:setX(-50)
container:addChild(ball1)

local ball2 = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
ball2:setAnchorPoint(0.5,0.5)
ball2:setX(50)
container:addChild(ball2)

container:setPosition(150, 150)
stage:addChild(container)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/xeL2VYcf5GYh6A0Q0UfLC31v6GmSytVp

5. Playing sounds

To play sounds, we simply need to create a Sound object by providing a path to the mp3 or the wav file we are going to play. Then call play to play it, which will create the channel currently playing.

We can then stop the channel any time we want or let the sound finish.

Note that here we don’t add the sound to the stage.

local sound = Sound.new("music.mp3")
local channel = sound:play()
--after some time
Timer.delayedCall(5000, function()
    channel:stop()
end)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/Piv3ED3WzarIh10kI4XZlHVRPU3d0fTI

6. Animating transformations

We can animate any transformation: scaling, position, rotation, of any objects.

So here we create a Bitmap object, and set it's anchor point to 0.5, 0.5, which will reference the center of the object (so it would rotate around the center and not top left corner).

Then we set up an enter frame event, which is executed on every frame, and change the rotation of image by 5 degrees on each frame.

local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
bmp:setAnchorPoint(0.5, 0.5)
bmp:setPosition(100, 100)
stage:addChild(bmp)

stage:addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, function()
	bmp:setRotation(bmp:getRotation()+5)
end)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/uKVF8Ho3jRmop7jcc2oII7tkeSnPLp0W

7. Frame animations

To create a frame animation, we first need to load each separate frames, either from a TexturePack or simply images as Bitmap objects.

Then we create a MovieClip object and pass a table with arranged frames and frame intervals to it (quite similarly as timeline in Action Script).

Then we loop the animation by setting goto action and start playing.

And the last thing, we set its position and add it to the stage to be rendered.

--load frames
local frames = {}
local bmp
for i = 1, 6 do
	bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("animation/ball"..i..".png", true))
	bmp:setAnchorPoint(0.5, 0.5)
	frames[#frames+1] = bmp
end

--arrange frames
local ballAnimation = MovieClip.new{
	{1, 5, frames[1]}, 
	{6, 10, frames[2]}, 
	{11, 15, frames[3]}, 
	{16, 20, frames[4]}, 
	{21, 25, frames[5]},
	{26, 30, frames[4]},
	{31, 35, frames[6]},
	{36, 40, frames[4]},
	{41, 45, frames[5]},
	{46, 50, frames[4]},
	{51, 55, frames[6]},
	{56, 60, frames[4]},
	{61, 65, frames[5]},
	{66, 70, frames[4]},
	{71, 75, frames[6]},
	{76, 80, frames[3]}, 
	{81, 85, frames[2]},
	{86, 150, frames[1]}
}

--loop animation, here, when the animation reaches timeline 150 it goes back to timeline 1
ballAnimation:setGotoAction(150, 1)

--start playing passing a starting frame number parameter
ballAnimation:gotoAndPlay(1)

ballAnimation:setPosition(160, 240)
stage:addChild(ballAnimation)

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/S3Kpqo3ZOdboN6v841glpCoeuVO8fqtm

8. Detecting click events

We will add additional methods to created Bitmap object which would scale it up on mouse down and scale back on mouse up.

Inside these events we will check if the object was clicked, using hitTestPoint method.

Then we simply attach these event listeners to corresponding events.

local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
bmp:setAnchorPoint(0.5, 0.5)
bmp:setPosition(100, 100)
bmp:addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_DOWN, bmp.onClick, bmp)
bmp:addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_UP, bmp.onRelease, bmp)
stage:addChild(bmp)

function bmp:onClick(e)
	if self:hitTestPoint(e.x, e.y) then
		self:setScale(1.5)
	end
end

function bmp:onRelease(e)
	if self:hitTestPoint(e.x, e.y) then
		self:setScale(1)
	end
end

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/ftug410tciJdebv5C3gGHnQSrozxWf7N

9. Getting user input

We can also get user input from TextInputDialog, for example, if we need a user to provide username.

We create a onComplete event handler to check if user did not cancel the dialog and retrieve entered text.

local username = "Player1"

local textInputDialog = TextInputDialog.new("Change username", 
	"Enter yout user name", username, "Cancel", "Save")

local function onComplete(e)
	if e.buttonIndex then
		username = e.text
	end
end

textInputDialog:addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete)
textInputDialog:show()

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/tJqCY55AVHII3pNDLLhpXk1MaCPBHOHn

10. Save/read data persistently

Sometimes in games we also need to save data persistently.

For that we can create a function to serialize any table data using json and save it by key.

Then we create a second function to retrieve the save information by the same provided key.

require "json"

function saveData(key, value)
	local contents = json.encode(value)
	--create file
	local file = io.open( "|D|"..key, "w" )
	--save json string in file
	file:write( contents )
	--close file
	io.close( file )
end

function getData(key)
	local value
	local file = io.open( "|D|"..key, "r" )
	if file then
		--read contents
		local contents = file:read( "*a" )
		--decode json
		value = json.decode(contents)
		--close file
		io.close( file )
	end
	return value
end

--try to read information
local someData = getData("someData")

-- if no information, create it
if not someData then
	someData = {"some text", 42}
	--save data
	saveData("someData", someData)
	print("Creating someData")
else
	print("Read someData", someData[1], someData[2])
end

try it online: http://giderosmobile.com/code/eimGPnEELLAyfuFQAAUzdUjNKKI1Rk5d

Here were some code examples of how to program with Gideros Studio.

Have fun!