Introducing Starling

How

Behind the scenes, Starling uses the Stage3D APIs, which are low-level GPU APIs running on top of OpenGL and DirectX on desktop and OpenGL ES2 on mobile devices. As a developer, you have to know that Starling is the ActionScript 3 port of Sparrow (http://www.gamua.com/starling), the equivalent library for iOS relying on OpenGL ES2 APIs (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Starling layer on top of Stage3D (Molehill)

Starling re-creates many APIs that Flash developers are already familiar with. Figure 1-2 illustrates the APIs exposed by Starling when it comes to graphical elements.

Figure 1-2. DisplayObject inheritance

Many people think that the Stage3D APIs are strictly limited to 3D content (and, to be fair, the name is a bit confusing), but you can in fact also create 2D content with them.

Figure 1-3 illustrates the idea. How can we draw something like a MovieClip with the drawTriangles API?

Figure 1-3. drawTriangles and 2D?

Actually, it is very simple. GPU are extremely efficient at drawing triangles, so the drawTriangles API will draw two triangles, and we will then sample a texture and apply it to the triangles using UV mapping. We will then end up with our textured quad, which represents our sprite. ...