When comparing Codea vs Rainbow, the Slant community recommends Rainbow for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Rainbow is ranked 79th while Codea is ranked 107th. The most important reason people chose Rainbow is:
Distributed under the MIT License.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Helpful code editor
Errors show up live, as you type. Smarter autocompletion picks up your local and global variables, including nested types. Everything else is just plain smarter, from indentation to highlighting.
Pro Ships with music and sound packs
Codea ships with three great music and sound packs, composed just for Codea and free for you to use in whatever you create.
Pro You can code on an iPad and easily distribute the game
Pro Location library
Location library lets you make use of the GPS inside your iPad. Get your latitude, longitude, altitude and more with a dead-simple API designed specifically for Codea.
Pro Open source
Distributed under the MIT License.
Pro Written in modern C++, is scriptable in Lua
Pro Cross-platform
With support for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Pro Optional FMOD audio engine
Pro Supports Spine
Pro Physics
Box2D integrated with Lua bindings.
Cons
Con Not as feature-rich as other engines
Con Small community
Being fairly new on the scene, there aren't much of a community to speak of.
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