
StageXL 1.0: Fast 2D rendering engine for HTML5 inspired by Flash - kasperl
https://medium.com/@bp74/stagexl-1-0-a9c5ff22a534
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thebosz
Congrats to the team! I've been using this library for around 6 months and
it's been a joy to use.

I came from using GameMaker Studio, so porting my game wasn't straightforward,
but that's the fault of GameMaker and not StageXL.

Part of the reason I chose StageXL was because of Dart. I've never been a more
productive, happier programmer than when I'm using Dart.

I'm using Cordova to wrap my game and distribute on the app stores and it's
been a breeze to write a game that works well on both Android and iPhone.

I'm super excited to start using v1!

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kasperl
There's a short interview with the author of StageXL, Bernhard Pichler, here:
[http://news.dartlang.org/2016/12/stagexl-10-chat-with-
bernha...](http://news.dartlang.org/2016/12/stagexl-10-chat-with-bernhard-
pichler.html).

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blockforest
Chiming in to shamelessly plug a demo app built around StageXL:
[http://rockdot.sounddesignz.com/template/](http://rockdot.sounddesignz.com/template/)

Feats: Responsive Layout, Canvas2D fallback for slow mobile devices, Material
Design Components, Google+ and Facebook integration, Physics engine
(experimental port of Box2d), Wrapper for BabylonJS, StageXL Runtime Examples:
BitmapFont, DragonBones, GAF, Spine, Particle, Flump

Bonus, port of FlexBook: [http://rockdot.sounddesignz.com/stagexl-
commons/experimental...](http://rockdot.sounddesignz.com/stagexl-
commons/experimental_book.html) (no touch support, yet)

It's at v0.6, so be kind.

~~~
bp74
The FlexBook demo is awesome!

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gavanwoolery
I don't have any basis for equivalent comparison, but it feels fast. Hitting
around ~20000 sprites in their bunnymark test before it drops below 60 FPS.
Also, for whatever bad rap it got, I still miss Flash. :)

~~~
bp74
Indeed it is fast :) And yes, many AS3 developers are missing the capabilities
of Flash. Therefore we built StageXL on top of Dart to have a similar
developer experience.

~~~
patresi
uBlock Origin on Chrome is blocking loading this file
[http://www.stagexl.org/assets/js/dart.js](http://www.stagexl.org/assets/js/dart.js),
it says that's included in the EasyPrivacy filter

~~~
bp74
wow that is strange, thanks for telling me. The file should load without a
problem!

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marknadal
Does DragonBones render out to StageXL for HTML5 games? My team is trying to
create explainer-animation-games ( our first one is up here:
[http://gun.js.org/explainers/basketball/basketball.html](http://gun.js.org/explainers/basketball/basketball.html)
) and I have been looking at your guys work for a while wondering how you get
such gorgeous fluid animations. Any tips on where to start?

~~~
bp74
Yes absolutely! We started with a port of the AS3 runtime for DragonBones but
were not happy with the code quality and the performance. Therefore we started
the StageXL runtime for DrageonBones from scratch. The downside is that the
new runtime does not support one or two of the features of the official
runtimes. But animations like the one you showed in your example are
completely covered. If you need something that is missing, just talk to us
here:
[https://github.com/bp74/StageXL_DragonBones](https://github.com/bp74/StageXL_DragonBones)

Edit: Animation run at 60fps and look smooth because those animations are
using bones and key frames. The runtime interpolates the motion of those bones
between the keyframes.

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markdog12
Happy StageXL user here. Great library and API. Chose it because I was porting
an AS3 codebase and it was the perfect solution.

~~~
bp74
Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

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kyriakos
Looks interesting. I looked at dart in the past briefly. Is still under active
development?

~~~
kasperl
Very active development; see
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsILKY-A1kq4e...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsILKY-A1kq4eHMcku3GMAyp2)
for a few recent presentations about the progress.

(disclaimer: I work on the Dart team at Google)

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_nalply
I skimmed the article and tried to find out whether StageXL needs a plugin but
it was not conclusive for me. Does StageXL need a plugin?

~~~
markdog12
No, it doesn't. But there are some that add functionality. They're listed in
the article.

~~~
bp74
To be clear, those added functionality is not a plugin in the sense of that
you need to install it. They are just libraries that are compiled to
JavaScript. In the end you just need a browser that supports HTML5.

