Adobe Air Mobile AS3 app: challenges and how to overcome them?

Question

I made a PC flash game for LD 26 - minimalism and I am working on porting it to Android.

Some questions I'd like to ask:

1. Is it bad to heavily use vector graphics (ie. this.graphics.lineTo()) in Mobile Air?
2. Does Stencyl completely alleviate this issue?
3. Are there any inherit disadvantages to using Air Mobile that I'm missing?
4. Where is the documentation for Air mobile (I googled and found no recent books or documentation pdf so far)

Answer 1

Old question, but:

1. If you have your games using Vector graphics, it's not bad, but it's likely not good. You get much better performance with bitmaps, especially if you're using a framework to use hardware acceleration for those bitmaps (e.g. Starling). Sure, some games can work with vector graphics, especially if it's in the desktop. On a mobile device or the OUYA, though, using hardware acceleration is pretty much a requirement for 60fps.

Now, you can use graphics.lineTo() to create your assets prior to drawing them to a bitmap that is later used as a texture. Perfectly reasonable approach.

1. They don't give many details of how their stack run on the platforms they support. I'm normally wary of any platform that says "do without code!" where is something that always requires code. It means they want to make something simple and easy, but normally very templated and limited.

2. Inability to use native features like, say, platform-specific billing. This is a problem every cross-platform solution faces. With AIR, this is somehow solved by using Native Extensions.

3. "AIR mobile" doesn't exist, it's just AIR. You use the standard AS3 Reference. Be sure to select the version of AIR you're supporting from the header combo, and latest "Flash Player". The same classes are available on desktop and on mobile, although certain capabilities might not be supported (hence why some APIs have isSupported properties).