About cocos2d
The open source platform providing suite of game development tools used by the gaming developers across the world is Cocos2d. Apart from developing games, you can also develop applications and interactive programs. You will find many independent editors in the Cocos2d community, providing efforts in the domains of particle editing, Tilemap editing, and many more.
This platform allows you to implement basic animation that can be implemented on sprites with the help of actions and timers. These actions are combined together to design the complex animations. Many Cocos2d implementations allow you to make relevant changes such as size, scale, placement, and other effects.
Various languages and platforms supported by Cocos2d are as follows:
- Cocos2d is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux; the supported API languages are Python 2.6 and Objective C
- Cocos2d-x is compatible with iOS, Android, Tizen, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Linux, Mac OS X and has API languages C++, Lua, JavaScript
- Cocos2d-ObjC is compatible with iOS, Mac OS X, Android; the supported API languages are Objective-C and Swift
- Cocos2d-html5 is compatible with HTML5-ready browsers and the supported API language is JavaScript
- Cocos2d-xna is compatible with Windows Phone 7 and 8 and the supported API language is C#
Cocos2d has been ported to the following platforms:
- ShinyCocos has been ported in Ruby
- Cocos2d-Android has been ported in Java for Android only
- Cocos2d-windows has been ported in C++ for Windows XP/7 only
- CocosNet has been ported in C# base on Mono
- Cocos2d-javascript has been ported in JavaScript for web browsers
Main uses
The major uses of cocos2d are as follows:
- Allows developers to write games for iOS and Mac
- Allows you to play a sound effect
- Allows you to animate a flipping sprite
- Provides pure Objective C code
- Allows developing regular old applications along with customized graphics
- Is available as an open source suite
- Simple and highly evaluated
- Portable to Android
History of cocos2d
In a town named Los Cocos, a game developer created a 2D game with many friends. This game was named after the birthplace that is Los Cocos. Later on several applications were made available on the iOS platform. And, then Cocos was renamed as Cocos2d. Cocos2d was ported into several programming languages that fit into all platforms.
In November 2010, the developer from China released cocos2d-x on the basis of Cocos2d. Cocos2d-x is also an open-source platform under MIT license and allowed compilation and running of code on several platforms. This game framework had been written in C++ and JavaScript.
