Stingray First Impressions
First time I heard about Autodesk Stingray was about year ago when I received an internal company e-mail about the launching of new gaming engine, and I was astonished by that news.
As a Mobile developer at Autodesk I had the opportunity to work on many projects, such as Homestyler Mobile App and Spark platform for 3D printing. These applications contain 3D engines which I feel very comfortable to work with.
Learning curve
Without any experience in other popular game engines like Unity, Unreal or CryEngine, I can proudly say that the learning curve is quite fast, of course you can’t expect to create a single game in one day.
My Team(Elias Cohenca, Ayman Horani, Tal Negrin and more friends) decided to create simple point and click adventure game using Autodesk Stingray. Our goal was clear — to create a working demo we can finish and show off, with very simple storyline and cool features, within 5 days.
The result was The Piano.
Node Base Flow
Very cool feature of Stingray engine is visual scripting, basically the ability to create the whole logic using blocks called node base or flow. Many functions are already built in inside the engine interface and even a user without any programming knowledge can create complex games and programs.
Programming Language — LUA
For me as a programmer the most interesting part was the programming language, and how the heck can I move things and control over objects with code.
Interesting fact is that Stingray dev team decided to use LUA as the main programming language for the engine. For developers who are not familiar with LUA programming language, in one sentence I can say that it’s very lightweight and intended for speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development. Reminds me a little bit of javascript. Speaking for myself, on my third day I felt very comfortable to program simple scripts, variables, functions, import modules and even OOP touches here and there.
The IDE however is a bit confusing. the autocomplete guesses the variable and function names, and I found myself making errors by misspelling their names. The compilation errors are not always clear, which makes the debugging process harder than what it should be. With that said, Stingray is still in its first version, and it’s being updated regularly. So I’m sure my above grips will be resolved eventually.
Performance
I have a mac and it’s a sad thing that Stingray runs only on windows. I had to bootcamp my Mac and install a Windows 10 on it just for Stingray.
Running Stingray on Windows with VM on Mac is not the best experience in the world, my Mac heat up after a few minutes (though it should be powerful enough: i7, 16GB, SSD) and was kind of slow. Bootcamp made it work and but yet it felt like it is too heavy for the system, and the fans worked hard while the game was running. Other than that it runs well for a game engine.
Conclusion
I would definitely recommend anyone with passion for game engines to go and try the new Autodesk Stingray engine and play with it. The tutorials are now still lacking, there are few tutorials on youtube and official forums that will push you forward with some basic stuff you can do. I’m sure that with more future updates the engine will keep on improving and will become one of the best in the field (competing head to head with Unreal and Unity).
If you are a student then checkout the engine for free here.
Cheers
Jazzy.
