Starling 1.6 is on the horizon and there’s one feature in particular that I’m really looking forward to: 3D Sprites. When I first read about Starling’s new Sprite3D class I wasn’t too sure what all the fuss was about but Starling’s author, Daniel Sperl, recently released a video showing it in action and now I’m excited!
While Starling will remain primarily a 2D renderer, the new 3D sprite feature will take any display object and let you move it around in 3D coordinate space. The video above shows some simple but really practical uses for it. On top of its new 3D capabilities, the next release of Starling will also contain the usual bug fixes and optimisations including: nesting of filters, memory overhead reductions, and parallel asset loading within the AssetManager class.
You can already take many of these features for a spin on the development version on GitHub.
Such a great new feature, theoretically it should be possible to use it to make rotating cubes and other cool pseudo 3d effects. Can’t wait to have a play.