The Stage3D APIs in Flash Player and Adobe AIR offer a fully hardware-accelerated architecture that brings stunning visuals across desktop browsers and iOS and Android apps enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities. This set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs provide developers with the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains in video game development, whether you’re using cutting-edge 3D game engines or the intuitive, lightning fast Starling 2D framework that powers Angry Birds.

Getting started with Stage 3D

To create hardware-accelerated content based on Stage 3D, you have a couple of choices. For developers interested in programming against the low-level AGAL language, refer to the documentation section below. For developers wishing to leverage their ActionScript skills, choose one of the 2D or 3D frameworks below.

Documentation

Frameworks and libraries for Stage 3D

To quickly leverage the power of Stage3D hardware acceleration, pick one of the many excellent frameworks optimized for the 2D or 3D game you want to build. Choose from two open source frameworks funded by Adobe. Starling, an intuitive, accelerated 2D framework which powers games like Angry Birds, or Away3D a 3D framework.

Starling

Starling is a 2D framework for creating hardware accelerated content with Stage 3D.

Starling content guide

Flare3D

Flare3D is a complete solution (tool and engine) to allow developers and designers to leverage 3D in Flash.

Creating games with Flare3D and Stage 3D

Alternativa3D

Alternativa3D is a 3D engine that allows developers to work with 3D graphics and physics in Adobe Flash.

Getting started with Alternativa3D

Minko

Minko enables the creation of rich and interactive 3D web applications, and can deliver high quality and interactive 3D graphics in any website.

Away3D

Away3D is a realtime 3D engine for Flash in ActionScript 3.0.

Away3D content guide

EasyAGAL

EasyAGAL is an open source ActionScript library that simplifies coding assembly language shaders. Advantages include: Code completion and hinting, easier-to-read code, macro libraries (including all the blend modes in Photoshop, ready to use in your own shaders) and more.