Storyboard Lite is a feature reduced version of the Storyboard Engine. It is designed to fit on to platforms that have smaller memory and storage offerings. Storyboard Designer can still be used to work with a Storyboard Lite platform as the main engine is the same as the engine that runs on desktop machines.
Each platform that supports the Storyboard Lite configuration has an installer ascociated with it. For more information on which installers are available, contact info@cranksoftware.com.
One of the new features in Designer is the ability to choose a feature set to work with for the Designer project. When creating a project for Storyboard Lite, users are encouraged to select the "Storyboard Lite" feature set. This selction can be done on the third page of the "New Project" wizard. This will reduce the number of actions that you can choose from in the "New Action" dialog. Some of the actions that are removed are the Lua callback action and any of the advanced screen transition actions. These actions have been removed due to the amount of memory that they can potentially use during execution. To add dynamic capabilities to your application a new action called the "C Callback" action has been added. This action allows the user to specify a C function to be called at runtime in response to an event. For simulation purposes on desktop machines, the C callback plugin will invoke Lua functions from Lua scripts in the project that have the same name as C function that is being called.
Another design consideration is to avoid the usage of rotated or scaled images. Rotating or scaling an image will require more memory by the engine to draw the image at runtime.
Storyboard Designer now has a metrics view which can be used to estimate how much memory and storage are required by an application. Also, there is a Resource Export Configuration editor that can be used to control how resources are exported by designer. Using this editor it is possible to reduce the amount of memory needed by fonts and images by drawing them directly from storage on the device. This will however increase the amount of storage needed to store these resources.