

CocosBuilder works with Cocos2D for iPhone to lay out sprites, layers and scenes for mobile apps and games

Source: CocosBuilder Swedish developer Viktor Lidholt has announced that his CocosBuilder development tool is now available as open source. CocosBuilder is a graphical interface for laying out sprites, layers and scenes for Cocos2D for iPhone – based on cocos2D, Coscos2D for iPhone is a framework that, with Apple's Xcode software, can be used to create 2D iOS games and applications. According to Lidholt, who has just been hired by US game maker Zynga to work on the project, CocosBuilder is "ideal for quickly and accurately creating menus and other parts of the interface, but can also be used to create levels, particle systems or any other kind of Cocos2D node graphs."

Lidholt has also published a beta version of CocosBuilder 1.1 that adds several new features to the tool. One of the most notable changes is the addition of a new plugin system that allows users to add their own custom classes to run in CocosBuilder. Other changes include support for CCLabelTTF and sub directories, as well as performance improvements resulting from "a new extremely compact binary format".

Further information, including download links for CocosBuilder 1.1 beta0, can be found in Lidholt's announcement blog post and on the project's web site. Source code for CocosBuilder is hosted on GitHub and is released under the MIT Licence.

(crve)