https://wiki.starling-framework.org/ 2026-04-21T09:41:16+00:00 https://wiki.starling-framework.org/ https://wiki.starling-framework.org/_media/wiki/dokuwiki.svg text/html 2016-12-23T09:44:48+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/adobe_animate_cc Adobe Animate CC * Install the latest version of the AIR SDK as described here: Managing the AIR SDK * Download and unzip Starling (to an accessible location on your system) * Launch Animate CC. * In Animate CC, go to “File” -> “ActionScript Settings...” text/html 2018-02-08T15:11:14+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/adobe_flash_builder Adobe Flash Builder This document aims to help you set up Flash Builder to use with Starling for desktop and mobile development. Edit General Setup Download Flash Builder via Creative Cloud (or directly from here) and launch the installation program. in this document Updating the AIR SDK text/html 2016-05-13T12:03:10+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/air-version-notes Adobe AIR Version Notes In theory, developers should always use the very latest stable version of the AIR SDK, especially for security reasons. However, in the past, some updates contained bugs or incompatibilities causing problems on specific platforms. That forces developers to stick with specific versions until a fix is in place. text/html 2016-04-26T12:48:16+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/animation Animation Animations are a fundamental part of any game. Starling helps you by making animations as simple as possible. If you think about it, there are two kinds of animations. There are the animations where you know from the beginning exactly what will happen text/html 2014-12-02T20:25:55+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/asset_management Asset Management Overview Every game or application needs certain assets --- be it textures, sounds, bitmap fonts, or various other objects. Those assets can be either embedded (which makes sense for browser games to have everything in one file) or files accompanying the game (good for mobile games to save the RAM required by embedded objects). text/html 2016-04-26T13:05:41+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/atf_textures ATF Textures In conventional Flash games, most developers use the PNG format for their textures, or JPG if they don't need transparency. In Starling, you can use those as well, of course. Through stage3d, however, Starling can offer a great alternative to these formats: ATF textures. Compared to conventional file formats, they have several powerful advantages: text/html 2013-09-18T08:46:45+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/auto-rotation Auto-Rotation A very cool feature of today's SmartPhones and Tablet computers is that they recognize the orientation of the device in the physical world, and may update the user interface accordingly. To detect orientation changes in Starling, you first have to update your app's AIR configuration file. Make sure that it includes the following settings: text/html 2016-12-19T14:34:14+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/constrained_stage3d_profile Constrained Stage3D Profile Constrained profile for Stage3D intends to increase overall reach for the Stage3D APIs to older commonly available GPUs. This allows more players to run your game with GPU rendering (as opposed to Software Rendering, which is a magnitude slower). This is especially useful for browser games. text/html 2016-09-26T11:17:56+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/context_loss Context Loss All Stage3D rendering happens through a so called “render context”. That's an object that stores all current settings of the GPU, like the list of active textures, pointers to the vertex data, etc. The render context is your connection to the GPU text/html 2016-07-11T15:12:23+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/creating_a_custom_filter Creating a custom Filter This tutorial will show you how to create a simple fragment filter. Filters work on the pixel level of display objects, applying shaders to achieve special effects that are rendered directly by the GPU. Yes, this will involve some low level code; heck, you'll even write a few lines of assembler! But fear not, it's not rocket science. As my old math teacher used to say: a drilled monkey could do that! text/html 2016-04-14T14:12:41+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/creating_a_custom_style Creating a custom Style This tutorial will show you how to create a simple mesh style. In Starling 2, all rendering is done through styles; by creating your own style, you can create special effects without sacrificing performance in any way. Before you continue, please make sure you have followed the tutorial text/html 2016-07-11T14:38:36+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/custom_rendering Custom Rendering In Starling 2, there are two ways to customize low-level rendering: mesh styles and fragment filters. Both have unique advantages and disadvantages, and we'll look at those techniques shortly. Custom Display Objects First, we should look at the basic building block of all tangible display objects, though. With text/html 2016-04-22T09:05:05+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/display_objects Display Objects A fundamental part of Flash is its display tree architecture. It describes how and where to draw objects on the screen. Starling was inspired heavily by this architecture: in fact, most classes and functions have the same names as their original Flash equivalent. text/html 2016-09-08T13:46:44+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/displaying_text Displaying Text Starling makes it rather easy to display text. The TextField and TextFormat classes should be quite self explanatory. var textField:TextField = new TextField(100, 20, "text"); textField.format.setTo("Arial", 12, Color.RED); textField.format.horizontalAlign = Align.RIGHT; textField.format.verticalAlign = Align.BOTTOM; textField.border = true; text/html 2016-11-29T12:28:39+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/distance_field_fonts Distance Field Fonts Overview Signed distance field rendering allows bitmap fonts and other single colored shapes to be drawn without jagged edges, even at high magnifications. The technique was introduced in a SIGGRAPH paper by Valve Software. While bitmap fonts are a great solution to render text in a GPU-friendly way, they don't scale well. For best results, one has to embed the font in all the sizes used within the app. The distance field style solves this issue: instead of providing a st… text/html 2016-04-26T13:04:55+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/dynamic_textures Dynamic Textures Starling lets you create custom textures directly at run-time. Depending on your needs, there are two different techniques to do that. Using Classic Flash Starling runs with the Flash/AIR runtime, so why not make use of its great vector capabilities? text/html 2016-04-26T11:57:11+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/enhanced_events Enhanced Events The Event system in classic Flash has one big issue: it always creates many instances of the Event class, which can mean a lot of work for the garbage collector. Furthermore, custom events may force you to write a lot of code for otherwise very simple things. text/html 2015-08-05T02:44:20+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/event_handling Event Handling A previous chapter showed you how to create a class that displays a message box with two buttons. However, the message box lacked a critical feature: there was no way to notice when a user clicked on one of its buttons, and on which button. text/html 2012-12-11T14:12:41+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/filters Filters This page will contain a detailed reference about fragment filters in the future. At the moment, it is just a placeholder. Here's the simplest possible filter: a filter that displays the object in exactly the way it was rendered in the first place. text/html 2015-01-08T10:26:58+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/finished_part_i Finished "Part I: The Basics" Achievement Unlocked! You have successfully finished the first major part of the manual. Congratulations! Now is the perfect time to grab a cup of coffee or eat some of the delicious chocolate cookie that is waiting for you in the kitchen. text/html 2013-05-29T15:48:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/finished_part_ii Finished "Part II: Advanced Topics" Achievement Unlocked! You have successfully finished the second part of the manual. Those topics really were quite advanced --- pat yourself on the back and shave off that beard you've grown during the last hours. text/html 2017-07-28T05:59:58+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/flashdevelop FlashDevelop This document aims to help you set up FlashDevelop to use with Starling for desktop and mobile development. Edit General Setup * Download and install FlashDevelop. * Get the latest installer from here. * If you need help during installation, this document contains further information. text/html 2016-04-26T13:07:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/flattened_sprites Flattened Sprites Performance-junkies will be happy about the “flatten” method of the Sprite class. It's somewhat similar to the “cacheAsBitmap” property that's available in Flash. Whenever you call that method, the class will optimize the rendering of its children so that the number of stage3D calls that have to be executed is minimal. That means that everything will be rendered extremely fast. And I mean it text/html 2016-04-22T07:47:34+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/installation Installation System Requirements The Adobe Flash and AIR SDKs are available on Mac OS X and Windows, so you can develop Starling-based applications on those systems. You can deploy Starling apps on a lot of systems: * Any browser with the Flash plugin on Windows and text/html 2018-02-09T08:21:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/intellij_idea IntelliJ IDEA This document aims to help you set up IntelliJ IDEA to use with Starling for desktop and mobile development. Edit Preparations * Make sure that Flash/Flex support is turned on in IDEA. * For this, navigate to Preferences -> Plugins and check if text/html 2016-02-26T08:18:17+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/introduction Introduction Starling is a pure ActionScript 3 library for Adobe AIR/Flash. It recreates Flash's display list architecture on the GPU --- providing a great performance even on mobile platforms, like iOS and Android. As a pure ActionScript 3 library, it requires you to have a basic knowledge of this language. If you have not used it yet, fear not: if you know any other object oriented language, you will learn it quickly. Thankfully, there are numerous books available that will teach it to you. text/html 2021-02-23T15:18:13+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/ios_launch_images iOS Launch images While the application is starting up, iOS shows a launch image that is visible until all the initial setup code is ready (i.e. your first line of AS3 code is being executed). There are two ways to set up that launch image: Using "Default.png" variants text/html 2016-10-20T11:09:18+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/memory_optimization Memory Optimization Many Starling developers use the framework to create apps and games for mobile devices. And almost all of those developers will sooner or later find out (the hard way) that mobile devices are notoriously low on memory. Why is that? text/html 2016-06-08T07:37:19+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/movie_clips Movie Clips Starling contains a very lightweight movie class: MovieClip. You can imagine this class as an Image with changing textures. (As it extends Image, it is really just that.) Acquiring Textures It is recommended that all frames of your movie clip are from one texture atlas, and that all of them have the same size (if they have not, they will be stretched to the size of the first frame). text/html 2016-04-26T14:43:08+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/multi-resolution_development Multi-Resolution Development When you are creating a game for the browser, it is normally displayed as part of a bigger web page, so you can create it in a fixed resolution. On most mobile devices, however, this is not possible: the game may run on devices with all kinds of different screen resolutions, and it will always fill the complete screen. How can we develop such a game with Starling? text/html 2016-12-19T14:36:22+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/other_languages Other Languages If English is not your native language, you can have a look at the following resources in other languages, translated by volunteers around the world! If you know of any other resources, please don't be shy and add them to this list. text/html 2016-07-11T12:36:15+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/performance_optimization Performance Optimization While Starling mimics the classic display list of Flash, what it does behind the scenes is quite different. To achieve the best possible performance, you have to understand some key concepts of its architecture. Here is a list of best practices you can follow to have your game run as fast as possible. text/html 2016-05-27T21:16:14+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/pivot_points Pivot Points Pivot Points are a feature you won't find in the traditional display list. In Starling, display objects contain two additional properties: pivotX and pivotY. The pivot point of an object (also know as “origin”, “root” or “anchor text/html 2016-12-23T09:52:27+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/powerflasher_fdt PowerFlasher FDT This document aims to help you set up FDT to use with Starling for desktop and mobile development. You might notice that it's rather sparse at the moment. Any FDT developers, please help us out by extending this document! Edit General Setup text/html 2016-12-19T15:03:26+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/project_setup Project Setup There are several different IDEs that support development with AIR and Starling. Each one of them handles configuration and setup a little differently. The following pages help you with configuring a Starling-powered project in each IDE. text/html 2016-04-27T13:22:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/sprite3d Sprite3D All display objects that we looked at in the previous chapters represent pure two-dimensional objects. That's to be expected -- Starling is a 2D engine, after all. However, even in a 2D game, it's sometimes nice to add a simple 3D effect, e.g. for transitioning between two screens or to show the backside of a playing card. text/html 2016-08-26T07:04:08+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/starling_2_migration_guide Starling 2 - Migration Guide The majority of the changes in Starling 2 are happening completely behind the scenes; for many projects, it should be very easy to upgrade to the new version. There are two exceptions, though: * The way to write custom rendering code (e.g. shaders) has completely changed. text/html 2016-04-22T07:02:19+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/starling_on_linux Starling on Linux Adobe stopped supporting the conventional Flash plugin on Linux with version 11.2. That's the last version that's available for download, and it's only updated with security fixes. However, not all is lost: * Up-to-date versions of Flash are available via Google's text/html 2016-12-19T12:50:28+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/start_old The Starling Manual The Starling framework allows you to create hardware accelerated applications in ActionScript 3. The main target is the creation of 2D games, but Starling can be used for any graphical application. Starling's API is very similar to the native Flash text/html 2017-10-25T15:28:35+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/start Starling Manual Most of the content of the Starling Manual has moved to its dedicated website. Find it here: * The Starling Manual Some of the content is still better handled in a wiki, because it's easy to update and fix stuff for anyone. Project Setup There are several different IDEs that support development with AIR and Starling. Each one of them handles configuration and setup a little differently. The following pages help you with configuring a Starling-powered project in each IDE. text/html 2016-04-22T08:17:59+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/startup_code Startup Code If you have set up your project correctly, you need to add the code that will launch Starling. Copy the following code to your Startup-class (in Flash Builder, that's the “Default Application” of your project). Normally, that class is named like your project, so exchange the class name below with the correct name. text/html 2016-04-22T09:16:15+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/textures_and_images Textures and Images In the previous section, you might have noticed that we displayed an image using the Image class, but used a Texture object to set the button's image. So what is the difference between an image and a texture? Textures A texture is just the data that describes an image text/html 2016-04-26T11:54:39+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/touch_events Touch Events While typical desktop computers are controlled with a mouse, most mobile devices, like smartphones or tablet computers, are controlled with your fingers. Starling unifies those input methods, and treats all “pointing-device” input as a text/html 2016-04-22T07:49:41+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/using_air_with_asc_1 Using AIR with ASC 1 The ASC 1 compiler is available as a component from the open source Flex SDK. To compile a Starling application for Desktop, you need the Flex SDK; to target mobile or standalone desktop apps, you need the AIR SDK, as well. You need at least Flex 4.6 and AIR 3.4. Get the latest version of those SDKs here. text/html 2016-04-26T10:24:46+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.starling-framework.org/manual/utilities Utilities The starling.utils package contains several useful little helpers that shouldn't be overlooked. Color Class In both conventional Flash and Starling, colors are specified in hexadecimal format. Here are a few examples: // format: 0xRRGGBB var red:Number = 0xff0000; var green:Number = 0x00ff00; // or 0xff00 var blue:Number = 0x0000ff; // or 0xff var white:Number = 0xffffff; var black:Number = 0x000000; // or simply 0