Autodesk Scaleform

Autodesk Scaleform is a Flash®-based user interface (UI) solution for PCs, game consoles, and consumer devices.

Autodesk Scaleform combines the power and performance of modern 3D graphics technology with the proven productivity and workflow of Adobe® Flash® and Creative Suite®, resulting in the faster creation of higher quality content. Its powerful features have made Autodesk Scaleform the trusted solution on over 800 projects, from big budget AAA titles to smaller budget casual games and consumer electronics.

A Design-Driven Workflow

Scaleform Workflow

STEP 1

  • Create UI assets, including bitmaps, vectors, audio, and video using the Adobe Creative Suite®.

STEP 2

  • Bring your UI to life by importing assets into Flash® Studio and adding interactivity and animation.

STEP 3

  • Export Flash® content to your game (powered by Scaleform) and connect the UI.

STEP 4

  • Test the Flash® content navigation, localization and functionality running in your game.

Why Scaleform?

Streamlined Workflow

Scaleform enables developers to utilize the Adobe Creative Suite to create menus, UI elements and 2D graphics for modern 3D games. Development is streamlined by empowering artists to create and rapidly iterate 2D assets using the Adobe toolset with little programming support which results in decreased labor costs and improved time to market.

Custom Tools and Kits

Scaleform provides a library of pre-built, highly optimized UI components that cover a broad range of uses including buttons, check boxes, dropdown menus and text input boxes. In addition, a variety of fully functional UI kits have been created to demonstrate Scaleform best practices and give designers a head-start on common use cases.

Multi-threaded Graphics Rendering

Our rendering engine combines multi-threading with the latest hardware features, making it the fastest hardware-accelerated vector graphics software available today. Rendering performance gains of 3-5x have been reported, in addition to a significant reduction in draw primitives and CPU/GPU workload caused by advanced batching and sorting protocol.

Mobile Functionality

Compatible with iOS and Android-powered devices, Scaleform allows mobile developers to leverage Scaleform’s lightening fast, hardware accelerated 2D graphic engine to create 2D and 3D applications, UIs and games. Developers can license our full source code or one of our new Mobile/Unity packages. Learn more about these packages here.

Easy Integration

Scaleform has integrations available for all major engines, including UE3, CryEngine, Vision Engine, Unity and Infernal. For in-house engines, the Scaleform API is delivered as a set of C++ header files and libraries with comprehensive documentation and videos to assist with the integration.

Custom tools and kits

Scaleform provides a library of pre-built, highly optimized UI components (CLIK) that cover a broad range of uses including buttons, check boxes, dropdown menus and text input boxes. In addition, a variety of fully functional UI kits have been created to demonstrate Scaleform best practices and give designers a head-start on common use cases.

Latest Features

Scaleform 4.2 provides improvements in AS3 performance and compatibility, more efficient rendering for mobiles, and support for new platforms.

1. Enhanced ActionScript 3 functionality

  • a. AS3 Application Domain - Application domains are used to partition classes that are in the same security domain allowing for better organized code.
  • b. AS3 CacheAsBitmap - This feature caches a vector object, renders it as a bitmap internally, and uses that bitmap for rendering allowing for improved performance when rendering complex vectors.
  • c. AS3 Net Socket - The Socket class enables code to establish Transport Control Protocol (TCP) socket connections for sending and receiving binary data allowing easy communication with external servers.

2. Texture Cache unloading - Saves memory by allowing users to set a limit on how much texture caching is used then unloading unused textures using either LRU strategy or user defined criteria.

3. AS3 Generational Garbage Collection - Improves performance by emphasizing the examination of recently created objects for garbage collection over older, more stable objects thus decreasing overall cycle times.