Have you guys heard of StarlingPunk?

(Nate ) #1

Hey guys! So I have made quite a few vanilla AS3 games as well as plenty of small FlashPunk demo games and practice programs! I have also made stuff with just AS3 and with Adobe Air was able to create mobile apps that ran pretty good. Using FlashPunk I have made a few small simple side scrollers and made them for my phone which ran pretty laggy using normal methods.

I was told that Starling was the way to go for mobile game making and such and after a google search earlier today I discovered StarlingPunkā€¦ so basically I wanted to know what you guys think about it?

From what I read it sounds like it looks just like FlashPunk but it is Starling? Meaning it will be wonderful for faster paced mobile games?

I also think I read people were able to port their FlashPunk projects to StarlingPunk? Were they talking about re-coding their projects from scratch? Or do StarlingPunk projects somehow allow FlashPunk projects to be wrapped within them and then the projects run like a Starling project would?

Basically, I am just feeling out what StarlingPunk really is, I want to make a mobile game and I want it to run fast and it will be a game that will have to run very smooth and was wondering if StarlingPunk would be a good option for mobile tablets and phones.

Thanks guys!

(Jacob Albano) #2

I did look into StarlingPunk a while ago. Itā€™s definitely not just a wrapper or library replacementā€¦there were some significant changes to the API that I had no idea how to cope with. :stuck_out_tongue:

Sounds like @Ultima2876ā€™s Stage3dPunk might be of use to you though?

(Nate ) #3

Okay thank you Jacob! I will look into Stage3DPunk!

(Justin Wolf) #4

I would definitely roll with Daveā€™s Stage3DPunk. StarlingPunk is missing a ton of features (including object pooling) and Daveā€™s is a complete drop-in replacement. So all the code is the same!

(Ultima2876) #5

Also feel free to ask me about it directly if you have any specific questions about it :slight_smile:

(Nate ) #6

Okay thanks guys! So Stage3DPunk uses all the same code as FlashPunk but will run god like on my phone?

(TaylorAnderson) #7

I havenā€™t gone into the mobile aspect with Stage3DPunk yet, but having very recently dropped it into my game, with a little bit of work (just fixing some smoothing weirdness) my game was running nearly the exact same as it was before, and just as fast (60fps)

(Ultima2876) #8

Haha, not entirely sure about ā€œgod-likeā€. It should run well; because itā€™s all the same ā€˜front endā€™ code (and thereā€™s a lot of stuff in there to maintain compatibility) you wonā€™t get as great performance as you would from coding the game from scratch in Starling (or indeed StarlingPunk). But you should easily be able to achieve great framerates with very little work. Itā€™s a tradeoff really; ease-of-use (and very little time spent!) vs pure performance. But arenā€™t we all here because we like to be thinking about making the games, not squeezing out every frame per second? :wink:

With the majority of games weā€™ve tested so far, weā€™ve got them running easily at 40+ fps on low-end mobile devices and 60fps on medium-high end devices.

The key thing is that it really canā€™t hurt to give it a try! (and let me know how it goes!)

(Nate ) #9

Oh yes I totally agree! I am not worried about the actual FPS since to me that doesnā€™t really mean as much, you could have a game coded to run at 24 FPS but still look very fast and smooth, which I have done before, I am more focusing on immediate response for input and such, which I have noticed on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) my flash projects seem to all run rather sluggish with their input.

(Ultima2876) #10

Itā€™ll almost certainly help with that. :slight_smile:

(Darrin) #11

From what Iā€™ve seen, dropping in looks pretty easy. Iā€™m curious on the PC side of things does this fix the jitter that often come with flash sprites? Starling is very smooth but as was pointed out above is missing a lot of the API.

(Ultima2876) #12

Yup, it should do from my (extensive, exhaustive and incredibly painful) testing :slight_smile: Thatā€™s actually one of the reasons I started the project.

(Darrin) #13

So I started porting a game into Starling (not StarlingPunk), then stopped. Here are somethings that are important be aware of.

  1. Getting sponsoships with Starling/StarlingPunk is much harder than Flashpunk. The direct wvmode of Starling turns off many publishers. There are multiple threads on in FGL on this. This was a killer for me.

  2. Starling for the hardware acceleration doesnā€™t support all ad codes. So if the Ad you are trying to support conflicts, there is no impression.

  3. I really liked Starlingā€™s Asset Management Class. Very easy to load everything. (Would be nice to get one for FlashPunk).

  4. I disliked Starlings animation classā€¦horrible compared to Flashpunk. I didnā€™t try StarlingPunk.

  5. Jitters. While there are less graphic Jitters in Starling and StarlingPunk they still seem to be there. So this is probably an Intel thing. I checked some Unity games and they do the same thing. Something to live with I guess.

  6. This took along time for to sink in for me. Depending on what I do with the sprite, running 800 on screen is not hard with Flashpunk. If you alpha blend all of them then it will be close to 140 or so. With Starling I can run 11,000 on screen. Yeah sounds cool and also manipulate them graphically. But here is the reality, when do you have 800 objects on the screen? I rarely pop over 70. Count them on a game that is clone of yours.

  7. Hitboxes v Pixel Perfect. This also took a long time to sink in. Hitboxes are good enough. Once I figured out the origin and shrinking the size to make it look close, I didnā€™t get the speed hit with masking.

  8. Not much StarlingPunk community. Forum is pretty dead. Starling forum is quite active though.

So anyway, I love this community and should be posting a game soon. Going to finish three very quickly.

(Ultima2876) #14

The performance advantage of Stage3D is mainly for mobile, where those numbers fall massively and Stage3D is usually the only real option for a smooth game. For desktop/web it doesnā€™t really matter too much :slight_smile:

Have you given Stage3DPunk a try? The goal with that was to capture most of the advantages of Starling while avoiding many of the disadvantages and keeping things 1:1 with FlashPunk (indeed, for most games weā€™ve tried to achieve ā€˜drop-inā€™ functionality)!

(Darrin) #15

Not yet, but I plan to. Need to knock out Subby first, then try it. Iā€™m about 80 percent done with the desktop version.

(Ultima2876) #16

Sweet! If you need anything then let me know :slight_smile: