Backstage2D is a 2D graphics engine for Flash and AIR in Actionscript 3.0 accelerated by the GPU on Stage3D, with an emphasis on mobile. I like to think of it as the GPU augmented display list.
Features
- A clean, easy to understand, small API, with as few gotchas as I could work out.
- Starts from familiar Flash display list assets, like vector based Sprites and MovieClips (with some caveats – they become static for example), so you get all the beautiful Flash rendering you remember.
- AS3 Signals (through SignalsLite) based event model.
- Automatic sprite sheet creation and management. No one likes making sprite sheets manually, but to make things run great on a GPU (especially mobile GPUs) you have to use them. With Backstage2D you’ll never have manually make sprite sheets again!
- The license is MIT so do what you want with it.
Planned Features (not done yet)
- Resolution independent measurement units (inches, metric, or simply a normalized pixel unit). This will allow for content intended to be 1 inch to actually be 1 inch on all screens, and with appropriate assets (vector art, or high res bitmaps) clean screen fitted content.
- Framerate independent animations. We’ve always wanted them, and now we can have them! MovieClips with independent frame rates.
- Dynamic or streaming MovieClips – CPU driven animations for when you want to get dynamic.
Limitations
- Imagination.