When comparing Starling vs Superpowers, the Slant community recommends Superpowers for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Superpowers is ranked 71st while Starling is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose Superpowers is:
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
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 Collaborative
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Pro Supports both 2D and 3D
This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making.
Pro Plugin based
The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app.
Pro Lots of handy built-in editors
It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor.
Pro Easy to use programming language
Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer.
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 Not frequently updated
Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income.
Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well.