2D Graphics

• Draw vector lines, curves, and fills
• Render bitmaps, and manipulate their pixels
• Display text with custom fonts and formatting
• Scale, rotate, and position nodes with matrix transformations
• Opacity / alpha blending
• Solid colors, gradient, and bitmap line and fill styles
• Masking
• Filters, like drop shadow, glow, and blur
• Blend modes, like multiply, screen, darken, lighten, and difference

Stage 3D GPU Graphics

• Programmable 3D graphics pipeline similar to OpenGL ES 2
• Vertex and pixel fragment shader programs
• Draw triangles
• Create textures from bitmaps or raw byte arrays
• Render to texture
• Mipmapping
• Scissor rects
• Blend factors
• Culling and depth testing

If you prefer, you can also use high-level libraries that are built on top of Stage 3D, like Away3D (for 3D) and Starling (for 2D), that abstract away some of the lower level details.

Text Fields

• Adjust font family, size, color, alignment, and letter-spacing
• Use bold, italic, and underline styles
• Embed custom fonts from TTF or OTF files
• Multi-line with optional word wrapping
• Horizontal and vertical scrolling
• Apply different styles to specific ranges of text
• Optional simplified HTML markup
• Optional simplified CSS styles
• Capture text input from keyboard
• Select ranges of text with mouse and keyboard, or even programmatically
• Copy and paste strings with keyboard shortcuts
• Restrict text input to specific characters or ranges of characters

Sound / Audio

• MP3, OGG Vorbis, and WAV formats (support depends on target)
• Adjust volume on individual sounds
• Adjust left and right panning
• Pause and resume a sound
• Seek to a specific position
• Embed sounds at compile-time, load them from external files, or from WWW URLs

User input

Mouse

• Mouse button down, move, and up events
• Click and double-click events
• Middle and right mouse button events
• Mouse wheel events
• Roll over and roll out events

Touch

• Multi-touch with tracking of touch point IDs
• Touch begin, move, and end events
• Tap event
• Primary touch point can optionally trigger mouse events as fallback

Gamepads

• Connect and disconnect events
• Button up and down events
• Axis move events
• Custom mappings

Keyboard

• Both physical keyboards and touchscreen soft keyboards
• Key up and down events
• Modifier keys, including ctrl, command, alt, and shift
• Use Tab and Shift+Tab to change focus between interactive display objects

Accelerometer

• Measure the physical motion of a mobile device
• X, Y, and Z axes
• Request a specific update interval in milliseconds

Network communications

• Load text or byte data from HTTP URLs
• GET and POST HTTP request methods
• Session cookies
• TCP sockets
• UDP sockets
• Server sockets

The display list

• A 2D scene graph with a hierarchy of nodes, called display objects
• Supports various types of display objects:
  • Bitmap displays bitmap/raster graphics
  • Shape renders scalable vector graphics
  • Sprite is a container that can add other display objects as children
  • MovieClip contains multiple frames that can play as an animation
  • TextField renders text with formatting
  • SimpleButton supports multiple states based on user input (up, over, down)
  • Stage is the root of the display list
• Add, remove, and reorder children in a container
• Assign names to specific display objects to access them easily later
• Tranforming a container’s scale, rotation, and position automatically transforms its children too
• Listen for user input events, like mouse, touch, and keyboard
• Cache as a bitmap for faster rendering
• Fast batched rendering with tilemaps

Events

• Dispatch and listen for events
• Supports adding multiple listeners for same event
• Set priorities on event listeners to change calling order
• Weak event listeners allow objects to be garbage collected (on supported targets)
• Events may optionally be cancelable with preventDefault()
• Bubbling events climb up the display list from the target, to its parent, and continue to the stage
• A capture phase allows catching events before they reach their target
• Based on the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification

Assets

• Embed bitmaps, audio files, fonts, byte arrays, movie clips, and text data
• Preload assets before starting app, or load and unload assets on demand
• Package sets of assets into libraries, which can be loaded separately
• Import assets from SWF files exported by Adobe Animate

Animation

• Dynamically adjustable frame rate
• A MovieClip display object may include multiple distinct frames that play in sequence
• Listen for Event.ENTER_FRAME to programatically update your scene every frame
• Use Timer or Lib.setInterval() to programmatically update your scene on a specific time inverval (in milliseconds)

If you prefer, libraries like Actuate provide higher level APIs for time-based programmatic animation (sometimes called tweens)

File system access (on native targets)

• System open and save dialogs
• Create or delete files and directories
• Load or save text or byte data from files
• Copy, move, and rename files
• List files in a directory
• Access system directory paths (user, documents, desktop, app, app storage)
• Access current working directory path
• Check if file exists, is a directory, or is hidden
• Create temporary files and directories
• Read size, last modified, and absolute path
• Query system line endings and path separators

Manage windows (on desktop native targets)

• Open multiple windows, each with a separate stage
• Resize and position windows with mouse, or programmaticaly
• Reorder windows by depth programmatically
• Activate window on demand
• Configure user’s ability to resize, minimize, and maximize

Miscellaneous

• Copy and paste text from system clipboard
• Full-screen or windowed rendering
• Customize mouse cursors
• Run executable processes, and read their output and exit codes, on native targets
• Object pooling for performance and memory optimization

Want to give OpenFL a try?

Get started by downloading OpenFL and diving into the OpenFL Developer’s Guide.