Refactoring for starling

Question

I'm making a flash app for AIR. The app is mostly made, but I'm not happy with rendering speed on mobile (render mode - gpu).

I know there is a framework that allows user-friendly way to work with Stage3d called Starling, but I've never used it.
After looking into it and following through some tutorials I've noticed that I need to rename all package flash default classes, e.g flash.display.DisplayObject -> starling.display.DisplayObject.

But such action might be destructive to my code base, plus, I have other frameworks attached that work with some flash package classes.

Is there a way to attach Starling to a complete project without re-naming all the package names, changing assets and re-factoring all frameworks that work with default AIR API?

Answer 1

If you're thinking of switching to Starling, you'll have to redesign your whole rendering code. Starling is no drop-in solution. Just renaming classes in your existing code will not do because it completely replaces flash display list for Direct3D, which does all it's rendering with GPU, with all the differences it brings: bitmapped graphics, texture atlases, careful draw ordering. Learning curve can be a bit steep in the beginning but once you get familiar with basic concepts it's a breeze to work with.

IMHO, it's well worth the effort, especially on mobile. Code that ran in low 10s of FPS in classic display list can easily be made to run at solid 60fps with Starling. Basically, for flash on mobile, Stage3D is the only game in town. And Starling is the best supported and widely accepted framework for 2D stuff on Stage3D, with lots of supporting libraries and a very helpful community of developers.

Go on, take the plunge, you won't regret it.

Answer 2

You can run Starling and a native flash application layer at the same time but it wouldn't give you an optimum experience. If you want to take full advantage of the gpu acceleration of Stage3d and Starling though it would be preferable to refactor your existing code to use Starling display objects rather than Flash display objects.

You might want to post this question on the Starling forum, they are very helpful guys and it's a thriving developer community! - http://forum.starling-framework.org