Book description
Starling is an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs (available on desktop in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). Starling is mainly designed for game development, but could be used for many other use cases. Starling makes it possible to write fast GPU accelerated applications without having to touch the low-level Stage3D APIs.
Most Flash developers want to be able to leverage GPU acceleration (through Stage3D) without the need to write such higher-level frameworks and dig into the low-level Stage3D APIs. Starling is completely designed after the Flash Player APIs and abstracts the complexity of Stage3D (Molehill) and allows easy and intuitive programming for everyone.
Obviously Starling is for ActionScript 3 developers, especially those involved in 2D game development; of course you will need to have a basic understanding of ActionScript 3. By its design (lightweight, flexible and simple), Starling can be used also be used for other use cases like UI programming. That said, everything is designed to be as intuitive as possible, so any Java™ or .Net™ developer will get the hang of it quickly as well.
Publisher resources
Table of contents
- Introducing Starling
- Preface
-
1. First Flight
- What Is Starling?
- Why Starling?
- Philosophy
- How
- Layering Restrictions
- Getting Started
- Setting Up Your Scene
- Wmode Requirements
- Stage Quality
- Progressive Enhancements
- The Display List
- Event Model
- Touch Events
- Texture
- MovieClip
-
Optimizing for Performance
- Release Build
- CPU Bound vs GPU Bound
- ActionScript Optimizations
- Running Hardware Accelerated
- State Changes
- The Painter’s Algorithm
- Texture Atlas
- Flat Sprites
- Batching with the QuadBatch API
- Disable Blending
- Use Stage.color
- Accessing Width and Height
- Disable Interactivity
- Optimized Event Model
- Handle Lost Context
- Juggler
- Button
- TextField
- RenderTexture
- Tweens
- Asset Management
- Multi Resolution Development
- Handling Screen Resizes
- Plugging Starling with Robotlegs
- Plugging Starling with Box2D
- Particles
- About the Author
- Copyright
Product information
- Title: Introducing Starling
- Author(s):
- Release date: January 2012
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 9781449320867
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