Playing with Feathers UI Components for Starling Framework

The Starling Framework allows developers to build 2D hardware accelerated (Stage3D API) games with an API similar to the flash.display.* classes. This framework is used by Angry Birds on Facebook. The Starling community is quite vibrant and many extensions are being made for it. One of these extensions that has grown into a full project by it self is called Feathers UI (previously known as Foxhole UI components), developed by Josh Tynjala. The...

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Texture Streaming feature in Flash Player 11.3

One of the new features in Flash Player 11.3 and AIR 3.3 is called texture streaming. This feature is a new parameter called streamingLevels in the createTexture and createCubeTexture methods of the Context3D class. That means this feature relates to Stage3D. Here is the text from the ActionScript reference documentation: streamingLevels:int (default = 0) — The MIP map level that must be loaded before the image is rendered. By default, the...

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Are AAA 3D Games for the Web Possible?

I will be talking about this question at PAX Dev in Seattle on Aug 30th. Here is the description: Building AAA 3D games for the Web require many features, including GPU hardware acceleration, shader languages, audio, input, content loading, content caching, and full screen support. This presentation will cover feature comparison of WebGL/HTML5, Flash, Unity and other supporting technologies and their potential in enabling developers to create...

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An Approach to setting wmode for Stage3D project in Flash Builder

There are a lot of posts on how to configure projects to get up and running with Stage3D. With Flash Builder 4.6 and Flex 4.6 SDK some of the steps are not needed, like getting a different playerglobal.swc and setting the -swf-version=13. But you still need to set the wmode="direct" in the index.template.html for Stage3D content to run. Reading a bunch of posts some people just change this by hand for each project. Others post about how to...

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