Introducing Starling

Thibault Imbert

Jan 2012 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

Starling is an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs (available on desktop in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). Starling is mainly designed for game development, but could be used for many other use cases. Starling makes it possible to write fast GPU accelerated applications without having to touch the low-level Stage3D APIs.

Most Flash developers want to be able to leverage GPU acceleration (through Stage3D) without the need to write such higher-level frameworks and dig into the low-level Stage3D APIs. Starling is completely designed after the Flash Player APIs and abstracts the complexity of Stage3D (Molehill) and allows easy and intuitive programming for everyone.

Obviously Starling is for ActionScript 3 developers, especially those involved in 2D game development; of course you will need to have a basic understanding of ActionScript 3. By its design (lightweight, flexible and simple), Starling can be used also be used for other use cases like UI programming. That said, everything is designed to be as intuitive as possible, so any Java™ or .Net™ developer will get the hang of it quickly as well.

Ratings and reviews

I had some problems where it would say the book was finished after the first chapter, but that seems to be resolved now. Wayne Roberts is wrong about it demanding payment, as the book is free from the publisher's website, and I couldn't find somewhere to pay if I tried.

It says free, but I have to put in a credit card number. Please change this and I will make a better review.

Very good introduction to starling, most of valuable information you will find it in this book

About the author

Thibault Imbert is a Flash Player product manager focused on graphics and rendering. After a few years working for different French agencies as a Flash developer, Thibault became an Adobe Certified Instructor in Paris where he taught ActionScript at an Adobe training center. In 2008 Thibault released a free and open-source ActionScript 3 book called Pratique d'ActionScript 3, which was recently rewritten for Flash Player 10 and released by Pearson in 2009. More recently, he released a white paper about performance optimizations for the Flash Platform. During his spare time, Thibault works on different open-source projects like WiiFlash or AlivePDF for the Flash Platform community. Most of his experiments are available on his blog, ByteArray.org. Thibault also attends conferences about ActionScript and likes listening to funky music and cooking macaroons.