2011
My new friend Starling…
I’ve been playing around with Starling lately, mostly to test it as an alternative to the way we currently build our game engines. If you haven’t heard, Starling is a port of an iPhone framework called Sparrow that was written by Gamua that lets you write very AS3 friendly code while taking advantage of hardware acceleration in Flash with its new Stage3D APIs. Starling allows you to push most of the rendering off to the GPU, freeing up the CPU to do other things. It’s also very fast… like really fast.
Most of the games that I’ve seen with it have been pretty simple. Some of the tests however, have been very impressive. It feels a little foreign leaving the standard Flash Movieclip behind and working with bitmaps instead of vectors, but I have a feeling that it will become more and more common to do so. Waste put up one of their tests at: http://www.waste-creative.com/games/invaders/ that was particularly impressive and on my machine, plays 60 fps consistently. I’d be really interested if we could get something as deep as Poptropica to run in a system like this…
Of course, there are other frameworks like ND2D by Lars Gerckens that are doing similar things. I need to play around a bit more before I commit to a particular framework for a releasable product. No doubt though that Stage3D is going to have a serious impact on the way we do things.
