GAF is an open cross-platform format to store Flash animations for further playback in a multitude of game development frameworks and devices. It enables artists and animators to use Flash CS for creating complex animations and seamlessly use them with various game development frameworks. The GAF Converter analyzes the bytecode of each SWF file and creates a GAF file, which can be played in the desired game framework, such as Starling.

Among the advantages of using GAF is the smaller file size. The traditional animation conversion process generates an image for each frame of the animation thus greatly increasing overall file size. However the GAF animation file stores only unique parts of the animation in a texture atlas and a highly compressed binary config file describing object positions and transformations. GAF also supports 99% of what can be created in Flash so artists and animators don’t need any special planning or preparations of their SWF files before converting. The conversion process involves many optimizations to increase playback performance across all platforms and frameworks, so performance of GAF runtimes is better than that of the Flash player.