I am creating an AS3 game which will be ported to iOS and I am using the parallax feature but I can't get a layer to go any slower than 0.1. Is that the slowest it will go or is there a way to make it slower still?
I want a sky layer to go 0.05 or slower.
Thanks
I am not sure you completely understand the mechanism
The idea:
The speed is given by the number of pixels moved in a frame and framerate. if you have a fps of 50, and a speed of 0.02 then your game should move the background 1 pixel in 1 second.
Since 1 pixel is the minimum unit you can move, moving the background by 0.1 or 0.0000001 pixels will not affect at all the view until the unit is reached (for user x=12.1212 is same as x=12.1213). Sure we must exclude any anti-aliasing.
So, as an answer: setting any speed should work!
Suggestion: when you set x, y, width and height properties, convert the values to int for performance reasons. Anyway if you do not use any level of anti-aliasing the visual result will be the same.
Related
there are spritesheets of tiles for a new game I'm developing. I'm planning to use them with mask layers. I mean for example there is 30 different tiles on each spritesheets, to use each one I'm planning to change spritesheet's x and y, so mask will show only the wanted tile.
But the problem is, it may force cpu.
For example if there are 30 tiles on the screen and if each spritesheets has 30 different tiles, that makes 900 tiles if I use mask layer instead of cropping each tiles.
So the problem is , If I use mask layer, does it effect the cpu in a bad way, or does only the part under the mask is calculated on cpu?
I hope I could define the problem clearly.
Thank you
-Ozan
Starling is a whole new field, as it's using Stage3D. This means you have to rethink your development flow - everything must be as textures and so there are a lot of limitations - you cannot simply design a button in your Flash IDE, give it a name and use it. I'm not saying it's bad, no, I just say you have to you it wise and if you don't have any experience with it - it will take time to learn.
I think you are doing some calculations wrong. You say For example if there are 30 tiles on the screen and if each spritesheets has 30 different tiles, that makes 900 tiles, which means you have 30 spritesheets with 30 tiles on each. This is a lot of tiles for your game, are you sure? :)
Anyways, the common approach is to use each tile of the spritesheet as an individual one. That's why it's called spritesheet. And the meaning of this is very simple - the memory it will use. Imagine you have 100 tiles in one spritesheet (for easier calculations), and this spritesheet is 1mb. If you splice it in smaller chunks (100 of them), the size of it will be close to 1mb also. So if you do this and delete the original source, the RAM that will be taken because of those bitmaps will be close to the original.
Then you want to use a single tile (or let's say your map is just "water" and you use only one tile). You instantiate many instances of the very same class, and because you use only one kind, the memory that will be taken in order to be displayed is 1/100 of the original 1mb.
What I mean is that the worst case scenario would be to use the total 100 of them at the same time, and this will take 1mb of memory (I'm talking for the images only). Every time you use less, the memory will decrease.
The approach of having a mask is worse, because even if you use a single tile, it will put all of the original spritesheet into memory. Single tile - 1mb. And it will also draw a mask object (Sprite) and will also need to precalculate that mask and remove the outer part of the Bitmap. This is more memory, more CPU calculations, and more graphic rendering (as it will draw the cropped Bitmap every time you instantiate).
I think this will give you an idea why it's used that way! :) If you have some fancy regions and that's the reason you want to use masking instead, then use some spritesheet packager program. It will provide you with a data file describing the regions of the spritesheet that are used, and so with a single class (there are many for that) it will parse your initial Bitmap, create Bitmap children for each chunk and destroy the original. And the coordinates won't matter.
Cheers! :)
I am making a 3D space game in Stage3D and would like a field of stars drawn behind ALL other objects. I think the problem I'm encountering is that the distances involved are very high. If I have the stars genuinely much farther than other objects I have to scale them to such a degree that they do not render correctly - above a certain size the faces seem to flicker. This also happens on my planet meshes, when scaled to their necessary sizes (12000-100000 units across).
I am rendering the stars on flat plane textures, pointed to face the camera. So long as they are not scaled up too much, they render fine, although obviously in front of other objects that are further away.
I have tried all manner of depthTestModes (Context3DCompareMode.LESS, Context3DCompareMode.GREATER and all the others) combined with including and excluding the mesh in the z-buffer, to get the stars to render only if NO other pixels are present where the star would appear, without luck.
Is anyone aware of how I could achieve this - or, even better, know why, above a certain size meshes do not render properly? Is there an arbitrary upper limit that I'm not aware of?
I don't know Stage3D, and I'm talking in OpenGL language here, but the usual way to draw a background/skybox is to draw the background close up, not far, draw the background first, and either disable depth buffer writing while the background is being drawn (if it does not require depth buffering itself) or clear the depth buffer after the background is drawn and before the regular scene is.
Your flickering of planets may be due to lack of depth buffer resolution; if this is so, you must choose between
drawing the objects closer to the camera,
moving the camera frustum near plane farther out or far plane closer (this will increase depth buffer resolution across the entire scene), or
rendering the scene multiple times at mutually exclusive depth ranges (this is called depth peeling).
You should use starling. It can work
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/away3d-starling-interoperation.html
http://www.flare3d.com/blog/2012/07/24/flare3d-2-5-starling-integration/
You have to look at how projection and vertex shader output is done.
The vertex shader output has four components: x,y,z,w.
From that, pixel coordinates are computed:
x' = x/w
y' = y/w
z' = z/w
z' is what ends up in the z buffer.
So by simply putting z = w*value at the end of your vertex shader you can output any constant value. Just put value = .999 and there you are! Your regular depth less test will work.
At the moment I am working on a prototype racing game, with an aim to get as close to 3D graphics, without having to use Flash Player 11 and/or DirectX. For this, I opted to use RotationX, RotationY and RotationZ to give me the desired effects. In order to make buildings become 3D, I created four instances of the same object and rotate/index them appropriately.
This works great, until there comes a point where there are a lot of these rotation objects on stage - Then the issues start with performance. Namely, there is none.
An example is here:
http://www.hosted101.net/car/Racing3D.html
If you follow the track around you will see that performance becomes progressively worse the more that is on stage.
Stages that I have taken to try and rectify this include:
1) Disabling Z sorting - This gave no increase in performance (to my surprise)
2) Disabling object RotationZ to follow the camera - Again, no increase in performance
3) Swapping Vector graphics for Bitmap graphics - Sadly again, no increase in performance
What exactly is causing these dramatic performance hits?
Is it just that having this many objects with 3D rotation on the stage?
To answer my own question here, in case somebody ever gets into a similar pickle:
The problem was directed related to the FPS of the game. Having it set to (originally) 120 wasn't possible for lower-end machines to match, as such different results were being seen. When dropped to 60, it was still too high and as such when multiple rotated objects were onstage the FPS dropped too low, giving the choppy effect.
Having set the FPS maximum to 24 and doubled the maximum speed/turn, the game is now working as it should.
Moral: Lower FPS is better, if you're aiming for lower-spec machines.
The link you posted ran for me at a constant 60 FPS.
Your performance bottleneck might be somewhere else if none of those changes helped, try to profile using something like TheMiner.
You can also try setting wmode to "direct" or "gpu" I noticed you are using "window".
Since you don't need any mouse events on any of these buildings and trees make sure you set mouseEnabled mouseChildren to false on all these sprites.
Those are the things that come to my mind hope that helps.
I'm making a fighting game, so I have giant character sprites (300px X 350px) with lots of frames of animation (~150 per character), so the maximum 2048 x 2048 texture size won't fit all frames of animation for a character. So, I'll need multiple TextureAtlases, right?
Do I need to worry about the costly GPU texture swapping, then, if I'm switching TextureAtlases on a MovieClip?
To change animation frames, would it be sensible to create a manager to select the frame and the atlas?
Or can I combine TextureAtlases so that one atlas stores multiple 2048 x 2048 sprite sheets?
How would you approach this?
A recommendation from Daniel Sperl on the Starling forum:
If you're sprites are so huge, I'm afraid you'll run into problems
with texture memory. Unfortunately, there is no easy workaround for
that at the moment, except creating that animation with "Spriter"
(beta):
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/539087245/spriter
Consider whether you can reduce your animation demands by doing skeletal animation. Instead of drawing every single frame of your character directly into textures, break the character up into animatable parts, position the parts using transforms and then composite them into your animation frame at runtime. It's a fighting game, so this should be manageable (presumably you only have two animated characters, plus perhaps some relatively inexpensive environmental effects). As a result, you only need each unique part of each character, which should drastically reduce your texture budget (but increases the complexity of your animation engine).
You might look at DragonBones (http://dragonbones.github.com/getting_started_en.html) for help in achieving that.
Where is this 2048 x 2048 limitation documented? I've never read such a thing. The only thing i could find in the Starling 1.1 documentation concerning texture atlas size is:
Any Stage3D texture has to have side lengths that are powers of two.
Starling hides this limitation from you, but at the cost of additional
graphics memory. By using a texture atlas, you avoid both texture
switches and the power-of-two limitation. All textures are within one
big "super-texture", and Starling takes care that the correct part of
this texture is displayed.
Assuming i haven't completely missed this important detail and there is no size limitation on texture atlases, just create a one at 4096 x 4096 or 8192 x 8192.
hmm - my guess is that using textures larger than 2048x2048 has an effect on performance. And i would further posit that shifting between textures of that size will also cause performance to take a hit. Have you looked into scaling down your texture assets and upscaling them in the game?
I'm making an action game and I'd like to know what should be the maximum size of the stage (mine is 660 x 500).
Also I'd like to know how big a game-sprite should be. Currently my biggest sprites have a size of 128 x 128 and I read somewhere on the internet that you should not make it bigger because of performance issues.
If you want to make e.g. big explosions with shockwaves even 128 x 128 does not look very big. What's the maximum size I can definitely use for sprites? I cannot find any real solution about this so I appreciate every hint I can get because this topic makes me a little bit nervous.
Cited from:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/display/DisplayObject.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/496/cpsid_49662.html
Display objects:
Flash Player 10 increased the maximum size of a bitmap to a maximum
pixel count of 16,777,215 (the decimal equivalent of 0xFFFFFF). There
is also a single-side limit of 8,191 pixels.
The largest square bitmap allowed is 4,095 x 4,095 pixels.
Content compiled to a SWF 9 target and running in Flash Player 10 or
later are still subject to Flash Player 9 limits (2880 x 2880 pixels).
In Flash Player 9 and earlier, the limitation is is 2880 pixels in
height and 2,880 pixels in width.
Stage
The usable stage size limit in Flash Player 10 is roughly 4,050 pixels
by 4,050 pixels. However, the usable size of the stage varies
depending on the settings of the QUALITY tag. In some cases, it's
possible to see graphic artifacts when stage size approaches the 3840
pixel range.
If you're looking for hard numbers, Jason's answer is probably the best you're going to do. Unfortunately, I think the only way to get a real answer for your question is to build your game and do some performance testing. The file size and dimensions of your sprite maps are going to effect RAM/CPU usage, but how much is too much is going to depend on how many sprites are on the stage, how they are interacting, and what platform you're deploying to.
A smaller stage will sometimes get you better performance (you'll tend to display fewer things), but what is more important is what you do with it. Also, a game with a stage larger than 800x600 may turn off potential sponsors (if you go that route with your game) because it won't fit on their portal site.
Most of my sprite sheets use tiles less than 64x64 pixels, but I have successfully implemented a sprite with each tile as large as 491x510 pixels. It doesn't have a super-complex animation, but the game runs at 60fps.
Bitmap caching is not necessarily the answer, but I found these resources to be highly informative when considering the impact of my graphics on performance.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/mobile/WS4bebcd66a74275c36c11f3d612431904db9-7ffc.html
and a video demo:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-evangelists-paul-trani/optimizing-graphics/
Also, as a general rule, build your game so that it works first, then worry about optimization. A profiler can help you spot memory leaks and CPU spikes. FlashDevelop has one built in, or there's often a console in packages like FlashPunk, or the good old fashioned Windows Task Manager can be enough.
That might not be a concrete answer, but I hope it helps.