I'm working on a flash project that incorporates a lot of artwork done in Illustrator CS4. I've been copy-pasting directly from Illustrator into Flash, and I add some animations as well. Final file is going to be a one single swf file which will be a part of UI for an application and .net will be the core for this. But now flash becomes unusable slow to respond for actions.
My machine is a fast i7 with 6gb of RAM, so I don't think that's the issue. We are going to use this file with dual core atom processors. Does anyone have ideas for alternative importing techniques, optimizations within illustrator, anything at all that will make this more manageable?
Thanks
All you need to do is to save your vector file in EPS10 format. In order to reduce the EPS file size it should be enough to reduce the linear dimensions of our artwork. It can be done with the help of Selection Tool (V) or command Scale (Object > Transform > Scale).
Even though the stuff you're pasting from AI is vector, Flash becomes very slow when trying to render all of those objects on the screen. Under the View menu, select Preview Mode, then Fast. The images will look jaggy on the screen, but the interface will be snappier.
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I am developing a 2D game using Adobe Flash Pro CS 6 and ActionScript3. I am having some trouble in developing some effects e. g. bomb blast, particle effects etc. I want to know, whether I can use After Effects for those and then use them the game. Please suggest me.
There's no problem of using any graphics data from any program in Flash as long as flash can support the file format.
In case of After Effects graphics, you'll probably have to export them as a PNG file sequence, so they'll most probably be pretty large in file size.
To import:
You can either make a movie clip and just import the first image of a sequence with CRTL/CMD + R and Flash with be "smart" enough to suggest to load the other files of that sequence.
If you want, you can load them during run-time, add them to the array/vector, create a Bitmap object and change it's bitmapData property on enter frame/timer to animate it.
If you are decided on using the actual After Effects graphics rather than emulating them using an Actionscript 3 particle effect, I'd actually recommend exporting them as video on an alpha channel and then converting that to flv and then hosting them individually and streaming them in via Netstream and placing them on the proper layer via an addchild. If bandwidth isn't a huge concern here, this would be a good method for achieving this effect.
Here is some documentation on Netstream. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d118a9b90204-7d4e.html
If this seems like it might achieve the desired result, I can explain further if needed.
For the past year I have been working on an isometric city builder. So far I have not used any framework apart from a loose PureMVC clone.
I have heard of Starling but only recently have I played with it.
From my research, the performance boost is fenomenal, but this forces me to manage my resource a lot tighter.
At the moment, I am exporting building animations one building at a time, in ~16 frames/pngs. These are cropped, resized and exported in Photoshop by a script and then imported in Flash, then exported as a swf, to be loaded / preloaded / postloaded on demand.
The frames are way too big to make a spritesheet with them, per building. I believe its called an atlas.
These pngs are then blited between lock() and unlock(). After the buildings + actors walking around are sorted, that is.
I am unsure if just using starling.Movieclip for the buildings, where instead of loading the pngs, I would build a MovieClip symbol with its frames. So bliting wouldn't even be necessary. Unless adding bliting on top of Starling would improve performance even more. That would allow fatter features such as particles effects, maybe some lighting.
Google isn't offering me a strait answer, thus I am asking here.
Google isn't offering a straight answer because there isn't such. It depends very very much on what you've done, how much knowledge you've got and what are your goals.
Using Starling gives benefits as well as drawbacks. Your idea of resources will change totally. If you really have enormous amount of assets, then putting them into GPU will be really slow process. You must start from there - learn what Starling does, how resources are managed with it and what you need to change in order to make the transition between the two.
If this is not that hard and time consuming task, you will have some performance optimization. BUT again it depends on your current code. Your current code is really important in this situation as if it's perfectly optimized your gain won't be that much (but commonly would still be).
If you need to switch between graphics regularly or you need to have dynamic assets (as images for example) you must keep in mind that uploading to GPU is the slowest part when talking about Starling and Stage3D.
So again, there is not a straight answer. You must think of GPU memory and limit, GPU upload time, as well as assets management. You also need to think of the way your code is built and if you are going to have any impact if you make the switch (if your code heavily depends on the MovieClip like structure, with all that frames and things) - it will be hard for you. One of the toughest things I fought with Stage3D was the UI implementation - there is almost only Feathers UI which will take you a few weeks to get along with.
On the other hand, Starling performs pretty well, especially on mobile devices. I was able to maintain a stable 45fps on a heavy UI app with a lot of dynamic loading content and multiple screens on an old iPhone 4S, which I find great. Latest mobile devices top at 60fps.
It's up to you to decide, but I'll advise you to have some experimental long-lasting project to test with, and then start applying this approach to your regular projects. I've done the dive to use it in a regular very tightened deadline project, and it was a nightmare. Everything worked out great, but I thought I would have a heart attack - the switch is not that easy :)
I would suggest using DMT for rasterizing your vector assets into Straling sprites at runtime, and it'll also keep your DisplayTree! meaning that you'll still have the parent/child relations that you had in your Flash Assets.
DMT will not duplicate assets, and will rasterize the vectors into texture atlases only one time (Cache is saved)
you can find it here: https://github.com/XTDStudios/DMT
I have several games that were built 800*600 and need to convert them to run on the iPhone.
Are there any "easy" frameworks to convert the application without having to create all new images for Flash/AS3?
I was reading about starling but I don't see any way to easily convert our application witout rewriting a lot of it.
Thanks.
It totally depends on your existing games. If they use a lot of vector graphics and full screen animation, performance will become an issue. But if you use a lot of bitmaps already, and not much animation, you might get away with just porting your games to AIR.
Flash CC has options to export assets to Bitmaps even if they were created using vectors ("Export as Bitmap").
You can optimize performance by using cacheAsBitmap on certain graphics (also look at cacheAsBitmapMatrix) but there you will enter rewrite territory.
I'm searching for Depth map algorithm for action scrip 3 (or some other language).
My goal is to generate depth map for static image on run time.
I have fount this example http://kode80.com/2009/06/29/papervision-zbuffer-and-dof/, i didn't have the time to investigate it's code but i have the filling its working only with 3d models.
Worst viable option is server side technology that does the work.
Extended description:
I have a task to develop flash application where 3d rotation of a head is simulated by a 2d image uploaded by the user.
There are some japan guys that have managed to do that (http://hairtry.jp/), but the technology that they are using is server side. It generates swf fail with precisely coped eyes and image for the depth map of the uploaded picture. I can't find out what is the sever side technology that they are using so I'm searching for any posible workarounds.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Chavdar Slavov
your easiest solution would be to use a 3d engine, Paper vision seems to be getting out dated, theres a lot of documents on how to use, and tutorials but again not much has been happening with them lately. i suggest Away3d "www.away3d.com" they seem up to date.
for what your asking it is possible to do this 100% in flash but to create a 3d head at runtime and fill the face with hieght maps this is possible, you would need to look at bitmap manipulation.i dont think this is an easy task, what you should learn first is how to add an image to a spheric surface dynamically than look into height mapping by converting certain coulours from the image into different levels of depth i must say im sure this is advanced stuff, i manged to animate a globe that was this same method it looks dodgy but it gives you some source code in the FLA
http://www.ffiles.com/flash/animations/globe_animation_3496.html
The above link will allow you to download my source files, the animation it self is a scrolling image but i used Actionscript to give the globe depth and a sheric look
I am making a flash game. And I want to know how big is too big for a swf file. Also, Ive been looking at my swf file and right now its at 38.2k. Is the swf file that gets created during debugging, is this the correct size for the file that will eventually be placed on the web.
thanks
Kilobytes is small stuff.
Anything less than a couple of megabytes is fine - once you get above that you might start worrying about loading times and keeping users interested during the preloader, but most portals accept files up to 10MB or so.
Yes, the file is the same. A game of 38.2 kb is pretty small, if you go on Flash game sites they regularly run in the multiple of megabytes.
The SWF is slightly smaller in release mode. The size difference is essentially nothing.
As for a guideline size, this depends on who you are expecting to play your game.
if you want your game to reach a very wide audience keep it as small as you possibly can.
a game without any heavy animation , embedded assets like png files or sound will usually be small.
a good discussion regarding Optimal swf size for flash games here at
http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=788271
The difference between debug and release builds is, according to my experience, some 30-40% in file size (debug version being bigger, of course), which is not insignificant.
Anyways, I think you're safe to assume that anything below 100kb is small enough to be considered an instant download, with no need to use preloaders. However, adding graphical and sound assets to the game will quickly push it up in size, at which point the preloader will probably be a good idea.