Unity, Flambe & OpenFL Skeletal animation libraries performance

Hey guys, I concluded my AS3 performances test saying that AS3 math performances are still a bit low and that with other technology, we should have better performances. So here we go!

Again I remember that it’s really hard to compare different Skeletal animation engines using different models (and so an engine/a tech). I would really enjoy to have the same model available for each soft…

Flambe
Using Flump with AS3 implementation I had very good performances 30 mascots for 54 FPS. Since Haxe optimized AS3 code, we could imagine that we would win a bit more fps. However using Flambe (which is awesome) and its own Flump runtime I didn’t save FPS. Worst, I lost many! I had 30 mascots at 30FPS. Bad surprise.

OpenFL
OpenFL still use Haxe for coding however it may export native code! On mobile we could suppose that we would win some fps too. I tried several libararies, but the only one I succeed to make working was this one from Lugludum studio. They didn’t try it a lot on mobile, they focus on desktop, but for a first mobile run it wasn’t bad at all: 34 FPS for 30 animated characters.

Unity
For Unity I searched a free library, and I was really glad to see there is an implementation (no official, there was missing an eye with my model) of DragonBones. I put 30 dragons, damn I had 60 FPS! And finally 40 dragons at 46 FPS.

So what to conclude? I was sad to see that OpenFL didn’t save me some FPS relatively to my AS3 benchmark. But we can’t judge a technology on this test. Unity math performances seems to be really good. Is it the best tool for making 2D game? Maybe, without any doubt they are on the good road.

Download sources.

P.S. Gaming for change? Have a look on A Blind Legend! A really nice mobile project using binaural tones! Oh and my colleague and me will work on it. So stay tuned 😉

5 thoughts on “Unity, Flambe & OpenFL Skeletal animation libraries performance

  1. Hey, thanks Michelangelo! We will certainly make a dev blog for this game 😉
    Yes Citrus & DragonBones work liked a charm, I will certainly use it again for my next game. With DB update 3.0 we won 10 FPS and that’s definitely enough for my game.

  2. There are two things responsible for bad performance with Spriter: Alpha blending and SCML/SCON Parsing. Take care of these two and you can have a 100 spriters with 60fps on mobile. Unity reduces the alpha with texture mapping, hence the great difference.

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