When comparing Starling vs Oxygine, the Slant community recommends Oxygine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Oxygine is ranked 18th while Starling is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose Oxygine is:
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything — but what it does, as efficient as possible.
Pro Feathers User Interface Components
With Feathers, you can easily add great user interfaces to your games — or even create business apps with Starling.
Pro Free and open source
Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub.
Pro Strong community support
Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems.
Pro Works with Flash
With UI, you can design it in Flash Professional (powerful 2D editor), export to swf file, use GAF convert swf file to gaf file, finnally, load gaf file to Starling. GAF can convert a lot of file swf to one atlas. Alway use same resource in design files (fla) to optimize atlas size, avoid duplicate asset in atlas.
You can use flash to create animation for starling.
Pro Hardware accelerated rendering
Let the GPU do the rendering, the CPU has more important tasks to do.
Pro Cross Platform
It can be exported to web flash player, iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X
Pro Works with AIR's native extensions
Using AIR's native extensions any native code that can be written can be run and used by the game engine.
Pro Constantly updated
New features are added regularly.
Pro Better performance than most alternatives
Starling can run more animated display objects than Unity2D and many others frameworks at 60 fps.
Pro Games can be built as HTML5 applications
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Pro Functionality can be extended with a bunch of available extenions
All of them available publicly at github.
- oxygine-movie for playing Theora movies with alpha channel
- oxygine-sound player for ogg sound/music with streaming
- oxygine-freetype library
- oxygine-billing for in-app-purchases on Android/iOS
- oxygine-spine for playing Spine animations
- oxygine-magicparticles for playing particles made with MagicParticles
Pro Will be familiar to users of ActionScript3/Flash API
If you are familiar with ActionScript3/Flash API, then you will find it easy to begin working in Oxygine. Oxygine is much like Flash in C++, as its Event Handling model is very close to that of ActionScript 3 and SceneGraph.
Pro Easy to use C++ API with optional C++11 features
Oxygine is written in C++. It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates.
Pro Free, open source and cross-platform
Oxygine is a free framework that works on OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5. It's licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Robust
It's very rare to experience bugs with Oxygine.
Pro Allows playing movies with alpha channel
Using oxygine-movie extension for Oxygine you could play in your game any videos encoded with Theora codec.
You movie could have alpha channel and used as simple sprite instead of classic spreadsheet animations.
Pro Allows for flexible contol over draw processes
Pro Fast
Cons
Con Poor text/font support
It supports only 4 features for text rendering:
- bitmap font with batching.
1.1. basic distance fields with support for outline and filters via MeshStyle.
1.2 the new multichannel distance field, the ultimate solution for bitmap font rendering. - Draw and upload texture in runtime
So every new text field required texture uploads or vertex/idnex buffer uploads.
skipUnchanchagedFrames keep the backbuffer static for scenes without changes between frames, leveraging a good rendering optimization.
Con Engine supported mainly by one man
Its open source but in most cases community features or pull request are canceled.
Con Inactive
The project does not seem to be active: there has been no new commit since mid-2019, the Twitter feed for the engine stopped posting news in 2018, and the forum is offline as of May 2021.
Con Little community support
Oxygine is a young framework. It was first released in 2013 and has yet to gather a large community. As of February 2016, the forum had just 123 members.
Con Not many tutorials available
There are not many tutorials available that teach developers on how to make a game with Oxygine from scratch. Because of this, it may be harder to pick it up or to start learning game development by using this engine.