Introducing Starling by Thibault Imbert

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 :

Click for demo.

Here is below another demo using Starling plugged with Box2D (for physics) :

Click for demo.

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) :

Click for demo.

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!