When comparing HaxeFlixel vs Starling, the Slant community recommends HaxeFlixel for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” HaxeFlixel is ranked 24th while Starling is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose HaxeFlixel is:
[Haxe](http://www.haxe.org) is a powerful, cross-platform and open source language.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful language
Haxe is a powerful, cross-platform and open source language.
Pro 75+ demos
All demos have included GitHub link, so you can learn from the examples
Pro Getting started guide
Has a starting guide for people who are completely new to HaxeFlixel; from installing Haxe to a beginner-friendly HaxeFlixel tutorial.
Pro Uses Haxe
(excerpt from source): To help you do this, the (Haxe) toolkit contains three main components:
the Haxe Language - a modern high-level, strictly typed programming language
the Haxe Standard Library - a complete cross-platform standard library
the Haxe Compiler - an incredibly fast cross-compiler
Pro Fully free
HaxeFlixel is fully free and open source.
Pro Hardware accelerated rendering on native platforms
Pro Active development community
(excerpt from source):
There is a multitude of channels to interact with the community:
Our google groups forums
#haxeflixel on IRC (freenode.net)
@HaxeFlixel on Twitter
The HaxeFlixel organization on GitHub
The HaxeFlixel page on IndieDB
Join our development chat on Slack[1]
HaxeFlixel group on Steam
Pro Powerful debugger overlay
You can watch variables, log (trace) messages, and check for memory/frame rate performance.
Pro Modelled after Flixel
But with considerable improvements -- the HaxeFlixel team are constantly working improving and fixing the HaxeFlixel API, as compared to the original Flixel which is no longer updated.
Pro Easy 2D game development
(Haxe)Flixel does a lot of things for you like tilemaps and collision detection, which makes it super easy to create 2D games.
Pro Outstanding community
The HaxeFlixel team and contributors are very active on Github and other community places (like Slack), and are usually able to respond to your questions within a day or two.
Pro Similar syntax to Actionscript 3
Haxe's syntax is similar to AS3, so Flash developers can transition to HaxeFlixel if they are familiar with AS3/Flixel.
Pro Excellent, robust API
The API has all of the features that you'd expect from a powerful engine without sacrificing organization and flexibility
Pro Cross Platform
The open source Flash API is powered by OpenFL, which allows you to compile to Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and even major consoles (coming soon).
Pro Cross-platform IDE environment
On Windows, the IDE of choice is FlashDevelop, but if you're looking for cross-platform IDE (Windows/Mac/Linux), there's Sublime Text which includes a package for Haxe syntax highlighting, as well as auto-completion.
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.
Cons
Con Small community
HaxeFlixel devs are not as large as (example) Unity devs, so the amount of support and exposure is limited.
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.