I am excited to introduce today a new project we have been working on, called "Starling". So what is it ?
Starling is a 2D framework for game development developed in collaboration with the Austrian company Gamua (already behind the Sparrow-Framework on iOS), running on top of Stage3D (Molehill). It allows developers to leverage the power of the GPU without diving into the low-level details of the Stage3D APIs (available in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). I am convinced that most of Flash developers will love this initiative, as most developers would like to leverage the GPU while reusing concepts like an event model, a display list, movieclips, sprites, etc.
Most of you, who had a look at the Stage3D APIs understand that this can be complex sometimes. So instead of writing 60 lines of code to draw a textured quad.
You will write the following :
01.
// create a Texture object out of an embedded bitmap
02.
var
texture:Texture = Texture.fromBitmap (
new
embeddedBitmap() );
03.
04.
// create an Image object our of the Texture
05.
var
image:Image =
new
Image(texture);
06.
07.
// set the properties
08.
image.pivotX =
50
;
09.
image.pivotY =
50
;
10.
image.x =
300
;
11.
image.y =
150
;
12.
image.rotation = Math.PI/
4
;
13.
14.
// display it
15.
addChild(image);
Quite nice hu ?
Of course, as a little obligatory test, find below a bunch of things (yes, sausages!) moving around :
Here is below another demo using Starling plugged with Box2D (for physics) :
Then, you have complete rendering of the your physics scene on the GPU.
Then of course particles! :
Click for demo (press right key for starting the particles and change).
Below a more concret example including MovieClip (through spritesheet) :
If you want to learn more about Starling, check the little book (Introducing Starling - 110 pages) I wrote about it, you can download it from the link below, it covers many concepts to get started with Starling :
click to download (Introducing Starling - rev 1.2.2).
Check the official Starling website to download it and share your content with the Starling community.
I hope you will like it!