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