Engineering Update: March 2017

20 March 2017

Engineering Update: March 2017

Our engineers continue to plug away at features to improve Corona! We will share a complete wrap-up of all recent accomplishments in a few weeks, upon release of the next public build, but we’d like to preview some of the new things you can expect:

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Google now requires new apps to use Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) instead of GCM (Google Cloud Messaging). We are building this out as a plugin that will be known as plugin.notifications.firebase which will support local notifications as well as FCM-based push notifications.

To support FCM, we will also add two Android dependency plugins for third-party plugin developers to use in their own plugins: shared.firebase.core and shared.firebase.messaging.

AdMob

We recently added support for rewarded video ads in the AdMob plugin, making it even more powerful. We recognize that native ads are another desired feature, so our engineers are working to get AdMob Express native ad support into the plugin. So far, early tests are positive.

Animation library

What started out as minor enhancements to the transition library has evolved into an entirely new animation library. This new library will support a slew of amazing animation features, including timelines for multi-tween animation sequences, the ability to adjust animation playback speed, jumping to positions within an animation, setting jump-to “markers” within a sequence, and more. This library should be released shortly after the upcoming public release.

Plugins in general

Daily builds since the last public release (2016.2992) have seen considerable improvements surrounding our plugin system. We introduced Android dependency plugins, added support for Lua plugins with assets, and did a lot of behind-the-scenes support for plugins — and we’re not finished yet! Currently, we are exploring ways to simplify how plugins can be included in your projects.

Conclusion

Corona continues to improve each day with improvements and new features. Stay tuned for the upcoming public release announcement and see all the goodness we’ve added!