Introducing Starling

Asset Management

So far we have been using assets in a very simple way. In order to optimize the way you work with assets, it is highly recommend using an Assets object working as a central location to get resources from. This Assets object would be responsible for pooling the assets used and make sure they are reused instead of being thrown away and instanciated again which could pressure the GC.

In this code, we define a getTexture API on the Assets object, allowing us to retrieve an embedded texture:

public static function getTexture(name:String):Texture
{
    if (Assets[name] != undefined)
    {
              if (sTextures[name] == undefined)
              {
                  var bitmap:Bitmap = new Assets[name]();
                  sTextures[name] = Texture.fromBitmap(bitmap);
              }

              return sTextures[name];
    } else throw new Error("Resource not defined.");
}

Note here, the use of a simple Dictionary, to store the asset, so that the next time we need, we just grab it from the pool, instead of recretating it.

As usual, the textures are embedded through the Embed tag:

[Embed(source = "../media/textures/background.png")]
private static const Background:Class;

Note that we have been using the Embed tag since the beginning but Starling does not force you to use embedded textures; you can also load a texture dynamically by using a Loader object for instance:

// create the Loader
var loader:Loader = new Loader();

// listen to the Event.COMPLETE event
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener ( Event.COMPLETE, onComplete );

// load the image
loader.load ( new URLRequest ...