The engine is responsible for converting layouts to/from display objects. It also has built in localization and tweening support. There’s a helper class called StageUtil to handle multiple resolutions in a Starling Builder recommended way, but it’s totally optional.
The engine is super lightweight and you only need Starling to get it running. However if you are using FeathersUI components or other custom UI components in your layouts, then you will need them in your project as well.
Absolutely, we are already using it in most of our current and upcoming Starling based games. (Juice Jam, Book of Life) The engine code is super lightweight and very stable. The rest is all about how stable Starling and Feathers are, and you already knew the answer:)
Pros:
Cons:
The engine’s job is simple: it interprets layout data to create display objects. It’s nothing different than manually writing code to create them.
However, parsing json data may be heavy sometimes. So it’s highly recommended to cache the parsed as3 object in order to avoid parsing the same data again. There's a helper class called LayoutLoader can help you to parse and cache layout data.
Because the UI components are dynamically created by the layout file, the compiler may not compile them into the project. In this case you need to manually link them into your project like this:
public static const linkers:Array = [SOME_CLASS_NAME];
Make sure you have met the following requirements for the property you want to bind
Either artists or engineers can use it. The best workflow is artists layout the UI first, then engineers review and make sure it’s good to use. Using the editor doesn’t require any programming skills, but it’s better if you know some basic UI components of Starling Framework(Image, Sprite, TextField, etc). Anyways it’s easy to learn, you can get more information from the Starling wiki.
It's most likely caused by the library version of libs in your workspace is not compatible with the one in the editor. You can fix it by either:
It's most likely some of your setting files are malformed. You should check what you have changed recently and fix the problematic setting files
It's most likely either the layout file you just opened is malformed, or some assets are missing. Check the error to see what’s the problem
In this case you may try to compile the editor and debug it to figure out.
You can change the look of the Starling Button and TextField directly from the editor. But you can’t do the same thing for Feathers Button and Label, you need to write your custom theme extension to be able to do that.
If you are making games that requires different look for buttons and texts, I would recommend to use Starling Button and Starling TextField. If you are making an app that requires consistent look for buttons and texts, then using Feathers Button and Feathers Label maybe a better choice.
The reason of this problem is TextField needs to save width/height but rotation will also affect width/height. Since Sprite saves scaleX/scaleY instead of width/height, you can wrap the TextField into a Sprite and rotate the Sprite as a workaround.
You need to delete your template override in you workspace. Either go to Menu → Workspace → Delete template override, or delete your workspace/editor_template.json. Then reload the editor to take effect.
First of all check libs folder to see if EmbeddedComponent.swf is present. Also you need to make sure to link your UI component class into your swf source file. The typical place to do that is EmbeddedComponents.linkers.