We create some MovieClips and use Motion Tween to animate them.
We create some MovieClips and use Motion Tween to animate them, then render all frames as .png and create MovieClips with all those rendered .pngs.
I guess second way take less time, because you skip tween calculation step. Which way of animation is more proper/fast?
It's of course the first one. Maybe your intention is good but it wouldn't pay off in the long term and it's also micro-optimization and it's considered bad. It doesn't make the code readable and it can slow down your loading time. In general calculation is also faster because you don't need to change the whole screen. So it really depends if the second version uses for example delta packing for the animation.
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I'm a beginner to AS3 and programming in general, but have learned enough that I want to now start learning how to render animations on the screen. These are the methods that I know of from two days of "researching" on google.
I'm not in a situation where I could afford to take courses from an educational institution, so my only means of learning are through online sources.
Update an objects x or y positions in a loop on every frame. Very basic. Of course any kind of advanced animation (say, showing a character running) is not possible with this method alone.
Using Flash and creating animation on a movie clip's timeline and, combined with moving the position of the object we can achieve some proper animation this way. However I cannot afford Flash, so this is not an option available to me. It also doesn't seem to be a popular option among more experienced programmers either (I think, due to having poor performance when lots of objects animating on the screen?)
Using a sprite sheet and then blitting the relevant image from the sprite sheet onto the screen.
Is there any other way to put an image from a sprite sheet onto the screen other than blitting?
And what other methods of rendering animation are available?
Some online websites claim that blitting is all I'll ever need, but I want to know all the options available so I could choose the most appropriate one for any given situation.
Any help would be appreciated :)
Another option for blitting is Stage3D. Take a look at Starling for 2D animations.
Blitting would be my best opinion. The only other thing I can think of is manually taking the images from the sprite sheet and putting it into each frame of an animation.
To render animation, you can create a frame in a MovieClip and convert it into a MovieClip and name the frame 'running'. Then you need to create an Enter Frame event where the MovieClip's instance name is 'Guy' and in the code on the function write 'Guy.x += 5;' to make your MovieClip go 5 pixels to the right every frame and also in the function write "Guy.gotoAndStop('running');"
Use TweenMax engine for better animation purposes. Easy coding, more Animation!!
I'm working on a kind of 2d platform ARPG in Flashpunk, and have run into somewhat of a conundrum.
Ranged weapons are no big deal. They are a flat image that I move and rotate to emulate the feel of throwing or firing a ranged weapon. Melee weapons are a bit more of a pain, as I want to use a sprite map for different weapon animations.
The problem I run into is that I have to manually adjust the hitbox for every frame of the melee weapon. I would like to use the Pixelmask function included with Flashpunk, but it does not seem to work with Spritemap. Is there a way to force it to work, or a way to convert the current frame of the Spritemap into an Image so I can apply a Pixelmask?
It's a bit hacky, but what you could do is create a Vector of images separate from the animation itself, with indices equal to that of the corresponding animation, and create the pixelmask from there. If that ends up being too slow (dynamically allocated memory being slower than reusing preallocated), you could load the images, create pixelmasks from them, and push the pixelmasks to a vector instead. From there, all you would need to do is switch to the correct pixelmask during the attack animation.
I have many small, identical vector circles that move around the screen, but only appear for a defined period in defined areas. Currently, these circles are children of whatever parent object produces them, and each is given its own interframe handler for animation (move a few pixels, maybe change alpha). With hundreds on screen, this gets somewhat slow.
Would it be advisable to cache the circles as bitmaps? Would it be better to add them all to one array and have one interframe event handler run through the whole shebang, even if up to 90% aren't being animated in a specific frame?
Would it be faster to cache one circle as a bitmap and set all others to use the first shape's bitmapdata? Would it be even better to use a "CopyPixel" approach to erase and redraw ("blit") every circle at its new position every frame? I hear conflicting reports of the usefulness of CopyPixel on large mobile device canvases...
If the animation can be looped make a movie from the movie else try everything you can. Usually a CopyPixel approach is faster but I wouldn't expect much. I don't think it pays the bill either hence reduce the numbers of circles.
I have an object in a Movieclip that I currently have a tween set up for. I set it up on the stage, not with actionscript.
I need to dynamically change the duration of this tween. I have not found reference to a way to do this.
I don't mind dynamically creating the tween if I need to, setting the initial duration in code, but I still have not found any reference to changing the duration dynamically.
Is this possible?
I'm just learning as3, so sorry if this is something that should be obvious.
I strongly suggest you to switch to TweenLite/TweenMax library, it's awesome, free, super-easy to use and it will change the way you work!
Have a look here, and here on the forum there's an explanation on how to change duration dynamically
Ideally you'd do it by programming the tween, there are many libraries out there that make it quite easy.
One of the ones I use frequently is eaze-tween, it has a timeline tween function, though I haven't used it, it is worth a try. eaze(target).to(duration, { frame:"label" });
Grant Skinner's gtween library also seems to be able to that using the GTweenTimeline Class.
The other thing you can do is modify the frame the animation is at at a varied rate, so to speed it up you'd go through it two frames at a time, so twice as fast. This way makes it limited to multiples of speed.
If you want to have more control there you'd need to have a longer tween, otherwise you might notice movement that is not very smooth. The way to do that would be to have a transition of a 100 frames, and use a tweening library, where the on update makes the value of the tween(which is a number between 0 and 1) and multiply it by the number of frames(100) and update the frame mc.gotoAndStop(int(val*100);. You can then assign various tweening functions and durations.
hope it helps
I'm writing a card game in ActionScript 3. Each card is represented by an instance of a class extending movieclip exported from Flash CS4 that contains the card graphics and a flip animation. When I want to flip a card I call gotoAndPlay on this movieclip.
When the frame rate slows down all animations take longer to finish. It seems Flash will by default animate movieclips in a way that makes sure all frames in the clip will be drawn. Therefor, when the program frame rate goes below the frame rate of the clip, the animation will be played at a slower pace.
I would like to have an animation always play at the same speed and as a consequence always be shown on the screen for the same amount of time. If the frame rate is too slow to show all frames, frames are dropped. Is is possible to tell Flash to animate in this way? If not, what is the easiest way to program this behavior myself?
The easiest way would be to use a Timer (or a setInterval) triggering every 1000/fps milliseconds, telling your MovieClip to go to its next frame.
If you need something more accurate, you'll have to check the time spent since the last update (stolen from the first comment of this article from Keith Peters' blog, which explains everything pretty well).
It's been a while since I used Flash but from what I understand it's not possible because Flash uses a frame based animation model.
Silverlight however uses a time based animation model and will just draw as many intermediate frames as the frame-rate allows.
The tween class (fl.transitions.Tween) is perfect for this situation. By setting the last argument of the constructor to TRUE then it bases its animations/triggers off of seconds, and as far as I know it compensates for FPS loss/gain.
You can easily use it like the Timer class by passing a new object (Trigger(new Object(), "x") to the constructor and creating a listener for MOTION_FINISH (TweenEvent.MOTION_FINISH) to trigger your event!
I use Tweens for a LOT of things because they're easy, fast, and supported by everything. And like I said, it should solve your FPS/lag issues since it adjusts to FPS changes in real-time (as far as I know!).