Hey guys,
most of you loyal forum users already know that there has been a *LOT* of progress since I released Sparrow 2.0. So the time for an update is long overdue!
For those who didn't follow Sparrow's progress for a while, here's a quick summary.
A few months ago, Robert Carone appeared in the forum and told an amazing story about the performance gains he achieved with Sparrow 2.0 after converting it back from ARC to MRC. That change alone raised the performance of Sparrow by about 260%!
Amazingly, this was not the end of the story; Robert helped me out massively for this release, porting over many classes from Starling and implementing internal enhancements I never thought about.
Thus, we've now got a version at hand that enhances Sparrow in every possible way; this release is almost as huge as the move to Sparrow 2.0 a year ago!
Here are some of the new features:
- Over 300% faster across all devices! Yes, you read right! 😃
- New "fragment filters" for special effects, including:
- Blur, Drop Shadow, Glow, Color Transformations, Displacement Mapping
- Clipping support for sprites
- Simplified usage of Sparrow through "Sparrow.framework" file (drag & drop it into your project)
- a new entry point for upcoming physics libraries
- heck, there's even pixel-level masking! (via this extension)
[As always, the complete CHANGELOG is available on GitHub.]
So there's a lot of stuff you guys have to try out! 🙂
I just added a new tag to the master branch, v2.1rc — please, everyone, try it out and help me fix any problems that are still around! I want to be able to publish the stable version of Sparrow 2.1 as soon as possible. People shouldn't require to wait for this release much longer!
Thanks in advance, guys! I'm looking forward to any feedback!