Apr 15 2008
7 Comments
By Mims H Wright AS3, Programming

A review of popular tweening library (UPDATED)

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The goal of next version of my (your) animation engine KitchenSync, is to be arguably the best and most complete library for animation and sequencing out there. To do this, I’ve spent the last couple of months analyzing the top existing tween libraries trying to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses. With lots of help from the Draw Logic Blog, I think I’ve identified the contenders and put together a decent list of what (in my opinion) are their highest and lowest points. The next step will be to create a product backlog for KitchenSync based on matching these features and fixing the problems. I know there are other tween engines but these seemed to be the most prolific ones at the time. The tween engines analyzed were:

  • Tweener
  • TweenLite (and flavours)
  • Boostworthy Animation System
  • FuseKit
  • Go
  • and KitchenSync 1.1

Note: After some helpful feedback from readers (THANK YOU!) I added TweenLite to the list of libraries I reviewed. I should add here that these are fairly superficial observations about how things work and don’t go into incredible detail. If I steal any features, I’ll look closer ;-D

Keep the comments coming!

Tween Engine Comparisons (updated)

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  • http://deafmetal.com Noah Aronsson-Brown

    What about TweenLite plus its Filter/Max flavours?

    I’ve been using them a lot recently as their speed (demostrably proved with Moses benchmark tool) is really impressive, especially considering what a small k footprint they leave.

    I’d definitely check them out if you want to be reasonably comprehensive. Plus they may even give you information that could help KS become the best as3 tween engine!

    Shame that papervision poke gig never got off the ground…

    Hope you’re well mate!

    .n

  • http://evolve.reintroducing.com Matt Przybylski

    I definitely think you missed a fundamental tweening engine in TweenLite/TweenMax. Out of the ones you reported, TweenLite is one of (if not arguably) the best engine available right now in terms of speed and file size. Nice work nonetheless.

    I also posted something similar to this on my blog recently:

    http://evolve.reintroducing.com/2008/04/06/as2/getting-started-with-scripted-tweening/

  • Tom

    You left out the best of them all, which is indeed TweenLite.

  • http://losdesigns.com Mims Wright

    OK! By popular demand, I’ll review tween lite. Stay tuned for updates.

  • Tom

    Peer pressure is a bitch, innit ;)

  • http://www.tuftandco.com Anthony Picciano

    Just a quick note about Tweener…

    We did a comparison of the available libraries, and for our purposes, we decided to use Tweener for implementing Adobe’s RIA interactive piece. It has lot more functionality than you first expect once you start playing with it, and the performance was very good. It handled moving and resizing a large number of UI elements, including bitmap and vector-based graphics simultaneously.

    Check it out: http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/

    A new version with even better performance (by means of dynamic bitmap generation, rather than the static images used today) and more videos will be out in the next couple weeks.

  • http://epioneersolutions.com Tran Minh

    Tweenlite beats all in term of performance and file size. But it has licensing issue.
    You may need to review boostworthy animation classes and tweensy. Tweensy is very fast (on par with Tweenlite ) but a bit big (50k) and it is MIT-licensed.