Release Candidate: Starling 1.2

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Release Candidate: Starling 1.2

(55 posts) (34 voices)

Started 10 months ago by Daniel
Latest reply from NagRock

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Daniel

Primary Feather
Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

My dear Starling users,

I've made quite a number of changes since Starling 1.1 was released -- I think it's time to raise that version number again!

Many of you are already using the head revision of the Git repository anyway, so I think the version should be very stable already. Nevertheless, it would be great if some of you could try it out with your existing projects and report if you have any problems.

Here is a rough overview of the greatest new features:

- Performance-Optimizations: again, I found a few tricks to squeeze out more performance. In some situations, Starling 1.2 will be up to 50% faster than the previous release!

- Starling is now using "constrained" profile of Stage3D (available in AIR 3.4 / FP 11.4). This extends the number of devices that can use stage3D; allegedly, up to 90% of all active desktop computers will now be able to run Starling without falling back to software mode!

- Enhanced event system: events are now pooled to reduce the memory footprint, and there are new convenience methods like "dispatchEventWith", and a new "Event.data" property. (More on that here)

- Updated support for compressed textures (ATF format) -- the corresponding tools will be published by Adobe within the next few days.

- New properties "skewX" and "skewY" on display objects to allow, well, skewing them

- Small but useful: the statistics display now shows the number of draw calls per frame. This makes it easier to find performance bottlenecks.

The complete changelog can be found on GitHub.

To test the release candidate, please just pull or download the latest version from GitHub. (I have already updated the swc file.)

Thanks in advance for your efforts, I really appreciate it!!!

Daniel

Posted 10 months ago #
eRistocracy

Senior Bird
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 134

Great Daniel! Thank you for your hard work on Starling. It rocks I have a question about Performance-Optimizations. In what cases can we see this 50% improvement?

Posted 10 months ago #
sjamientje

Hatchling
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 3

Daniel very nice thank you. It's a pleasure to work with the Starling framework! Happy coding!

Posted 10 months ago #
Daniel

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Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461
Thanks, guys! =)

eRistocracy, here are the results of the Starling benchmark on the iPad 1, with a 32x32 texture (to rule out hitting the iPad's fill-rate).
```
Starling v1.1:  690 objects
Starling v1.2: 1080 objects
```
In this test, v1.2 reaches 156% of the performance of v1.1 (in other words: 56% faster).
Pretty neat, right?
Posted 10 months ago #
Makio

Competent Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 55

Awesome job !

Peoples look for performance before all for create beautyfull game so it's a great news !

Do you think create a Worker(Thread) for Starling display mechanics and one other for the game loop (IA/AStar/etc..) will be a good idea for performance ?

Posted 10 months ago #
eRistocracy

Senior Bird
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 134

Indeed Daniel. That is a lot What do you plan for version 1.3?

Posted 10 months ago #
stortof

Senior Bird
Joined: Mar '12
Posts: 112

"Merci" for your great job Daniel!

Posted 10 months ago #
Mojomajor

Competent Bird
Joined: Jun '12
Posts: 26

Awesome, Daniel!

Posted 10 months ago #
sjamientje

Hatchling
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 3

@eRistocracy: give the man a break

Posted 10 months ago #
eRistocracy

Senior Bird
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 134

You are right @sjamientje
Daniel! Go on your deserved holidays. You should have at least one month free-time, while we will be testing your latest release and wonderful features you provided. I am so excited about Starling. One year ago I was very skeptic about Flash and I was even starting to learn Java, but I was sure that Steve Jobs wasn't right. Thanks to Adobe's and Daniel's hard work, we are now in best position ever AIR is everywhere

Posted 10 months ago #
booster

Senior Bird
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 154

So filters and masking didn't make it to 1.2? Do you plan to add them in 1.3, Daniel?

This performance boost is really impressive - do you think you can still optimize it even more?

Posted 10 months ago #
frisk

Senior Bird
Joined: Jan '12
Posts: 115

Good work,

I like the draw calls stats the most

Helped me to reduce the calls on the main screen from more than 80 to less than 30.
I wasn't aware of that initially. Maybe I can get to 15 or 20, by using less alpha-values.

I'll test on a low-end phone if this brings a performance difference. On an iPhone 4S it was anyhow @60fps (even before these changes).

Posted 10 months ago #
Daniel

Primary Feather
Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

Guys, thanks a lot for all that great feedback! This really means a lot to me -- nothing is more motivating than people like you using and enjoying the framework!

Haha, nope, holidays will have to wait a little. So much to do, how should I actually relax?!

The planned features for Starling 1.3 are filters and/or masks and pixel-perfect hit-tests. Probably I will do filters first, including one filter that works like a mask. (Still, maybe I will add a dedicated masking system later, that could be faster than the filter-solution.) The road map is not carved in stone, though.

Booster, I've got a few more ideas for optimizations, like caching some more matrix operations. But one after the other.

Posted 10 months ago #
Rasalexman

Hatchling
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 1

VERY COOL!!! THANX!

Posted 10 months ago #
booster

Senior Bird
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 154

Those filters are really something I'm waiting for. Can you tell us a bit more about your idea of doing it? How will they work? I presume this will be some thin wrapper on vertex/pixel shader layer, so will we have to write our own custom shaders to create custom filters (or will there simply be an option to do that)?

Posted 10 months ago #
Michoko

Competent Bird
Joined: Jan '12
Posts: 40

Awesome work Daniel, done by a great guy! Your always kind and supportive behaviour makes your framework even more enjoyable to use!

I'm also very interested in filters, especially if they allow effects like the native rotationY feature. It would allow to recreate cool interfaces like iOS coverflow.

Posted 10 months ago #
YopSolo

Novice Bird
Joined: Nov '11
Posts: 15

Great ! thx for you amazing work.

Posted 10 months ago #
Daniel

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Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

Again, thanks for the great feedback! =)

Makio, I'd use worker threads for specific, long tasks, like AI calculations. It's a little difficult to share data with a worker thread, so it's best suited for things that can be easily separated.

Booster, I'm not 100% sure about the best architecture for the filters. My current plan is to provide a base filter class that can easily subclass, and which allows you to write a custom fragment shader (without all the boiler plate code that is required in a custom display object). Per default, the filter will contain a quad that contains a RenderTexture with the contents of the display object the mask is attached to. That would make it very easy to create e.g. a blur filter.

The big question with that architecture is how fast this turns out on slower devices. It may be that I have to provide a solution that does not require the RenderTexture. That would make filters that extend beyond the bounds of the original object (e.g. blur, drop shadow) rather difficult, though.

Thus, the exact architecture will be made up along the way.

Michoko, I originally planned to implement 3D transformations with filters, as well, but I'm currently favoring a "Sprite3D" object that has the properties you know from Flash 10 (rotationX, rotationY, etc.), but contains conventional 2D DisplayObjects. That should be equally powerful as the Flash 10 solution, without any performance penalties for 2D display objects. That feature will probably be part of version 1.4.

Posted 10 months ago #
Michoko

Competent Bird
Joined: Jan '12
Posts: 40

Awesome! Thank you Daniel!

Posted 10 months ago #
Artemix

Moderating Bird
Joined: Apr '12
Posts: 340

Great job Daniel!, thanks for the time spent on this.

Posted 10 months ago #
hellopaso

Competent Bird
Joined: Jan '12
Posts: 42

For the last 2 weeks I am working on new starling game, and
just compiled with Starling 1.2 and must agree - awesome!

thanks

Posted 10 months ago #
NeoGuo

Competent Bird
Joined: Apr '12
Posts: 23

Great !
Thanks Daniel !
I have published this article to Starling Chinese WIKI:
http://www.starlinglib.com/wiki/News:Starling1.2RC

Posted 10 months ago #
sjamientje

Hatchling
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 3

Hi, the performance is KING! Solid 60 fps on iPad 2 with detailed tilemap and numerous moving objects! The juggler is cleaned properly (gave me a heart attack at first ;). But question, using the starling src (not swc) is missing the statistics? I'll use the SWC.

Once again cheers on the work!

Posted 10 months ago #
resistcorp

Competent Bird
Joined: Jul '12
Posts: 20

I just downloaded it and my game worked almost out-of-the-box!
The only adaptation I had to make is returning a display object in addChild and removeChild overrides. But I had wondered before why they were :void.

Also, can't wait to get my hands dirty with ATF!

Once again, great work, Daniel.

Posted 10 months ago #
Daniel

Primary Feather
Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

Thanks to all of you for testing it and for the great feedback!

NeoGuo, thank you very much for that translation!
sjamientje, what do you mean with the missing statistics? Is there a file missing?

Posted 10 months ago #
danieldourado_2

Moderating Bird
Joined: Feb '12
Posts: 207

Great work, Daniel. Thank you very much. You know your Starling ROCKS!

Posted 10 months ago #
pablo_M

Novice Bird
Joined: Jun '12
Posts: 5

Thanks Daniel for the development of this powerful framework!! The good work, passion in what you do, interest in helping us and improving the engine performance turn you and your collaborators into an essential part of our projects. We discovered the power of the GPU with Starling and now we can not live a day without calling starling.start();
We have tested Starling 1.2 and seems that works fine in our Android 4 devices. We are also waiting for the mysterious and awaited ATF tools of adobe... What will be the next surprise?

Thanks!

Posted 10 months ago #
Rayne

Competent Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 40

Being an iPad 1 user, these developments have really been great! I was struggling to get the desired performance on iPad 1 and now things are running so much smoother. Thanks Daniel!

Posted 10 months ago #
Immudelki

Hatchling
Joined: Apr '12
Posts: 2

Thanks you very much for all those cool improvements Daniel, all those new features were so unexpected for me... So great ! You rocks !
Now waiting for those ATF tools from Adobe >>

Posted 10 months ago #
chixplusplus

Novice Bird
Joined: Mar '12
Posts: 8

Thanks to Daniel and the contributors! this is a huge framework update. Starling rocks!:D

Posted 10 months ago #

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