When comparing Starling vs Modd.io, the Slant community recommends Starling for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Starling is ranked 78th while Modd.io is ranked 94th. The most important reason people chose Starling is:
Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything — but what it does, as efficient as possible.
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 Its Fun, its easy to script
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Pro Runs well on low-end devices
The game client doesn't use much CPU nor bandwidth.
Pro Free
By far, this engine is completely free to use.
Pro No installation required - super easy to get started
Modd.io runs in browser, it provides IDE, map editor, and asset manager all in one platform, so you don't need to download or setup anything.
Pro Easy to use free Asset Library
You can easily change your game assets (images, sound, etc) with a single click using modd.io Asset Library
Pro Has multiplayer support baked in
This engine supports up to 64 concurrent players, and hosts servers for you as well
Pro Perfect for Impatient game developers
It literally takes 5 minutes from signup to publishing my game
Pro Easy to use
Modd.io is designed for new/intermediate developers who wants to get into game development. You should be comfortable using the engine after spending about 15 minutes in watching tutorial videos
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 The engine is evolving in a bad way
Over the last updates, many useful features have been removed, making it harder to create more complex games.
Con Not very secure
Modd.io comes with its own security issues. Many of them have been used to destroy eachother's games, which completely busts your progress on your game unless you have backed it up by exporting it's JSON.
Con Not Possible for stuff
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Con Annoying asset size limit
Each asset is limited to 800kb (except for audio being 3mb) which is okay for simple assets but unacceptable for creating spritesheets for animations or tilesheets for the map.
Con Very flat map
No matter how well game maps are made, all of them look just not beautiful.
Con No/limited camera manipulation
You cannot create a shake effect which is also urgently needed in complex game creation.
Con Certain variable datatypes are urgently needed but do not exist.
Such datatypes as arrays composed of numbers, strings, etc are needed to create complex games but just do not exist in this game engine.
Con Joke-y community
Most of the staff team in the community are constantly behaving like jokers. It just always feels like 80% of the staff team is not the right pick for such a community.
Con The homepage is not good
The homepage allows players to join your game, but the way it works is just not good. The "unpopular 0 player" games get less exposure than the popular games. The tier system also puts a star on your game card which also lures players to your game making them think this game has a special event or something, giving a disadvantage to the less popular games which are still so called "Tier 1".
Con Not very powerful
This engine is ready to use right away, but already starts dropping framerate at over 1000 units which are not very active.
Con Tier-based servers with certain lockdowns
Modd.io "tiers" all the games you create. The very basic tier, commonly called "Tier 1" is very limited and removes motivation to develop a game.
Con You'll have to learn a new programming language
This engine has it's own IDE with a drag and drop style programming language. It does take a good 2 hours to get familiar with the API..
Con No lower level API access
You cannot access lower-level APIs through this engine, such as the renderer.
Con No single player support
All games in modd.io must support multi-player game mode.
Con Limited customizability
Modd.io is designed to be good at making "specific" kind of multiplayer games. Its strength unleashes if you don't care too much about the specifics in UI. For example, if you wanted to make a casual death match game, it is extremely easy to make it using modd.io. However, if you want to create a puzzle game with a unique UI, it becomes very time consuming.
Con No 3D support
This engine is limited to 2D only.
