I have a project with only a couple of graphics and lots of ActionScript 3.
Anyone have any tips on reducing SWF file size?
First thing to do is turn on the size report (Don't have Flash handy, but should be in publish settings) and take a look at what is really taking up that space. From your description, it should mostly be in actionscript.
If you have any dynamic or text fields with embedded fonts, be careful you are embedding only the subset of characters you need, if you are using bitmaps, make sure you are using appropriate compression (lossless is actually better for 'computery' images, lots of solid colors or simple gradients).
As for reducing actionscript byte size... try the obvious things first: use publish or test instead of debug (Shift-F12 or Ctrl-Enter, not Ctrl-Shift-Enter) to compile release code, double-check that there are not flash built-in functions you can use instead of actionscript, use functions to share code, add local variables to reduce common sub-expressions.
You could try one of avoiding dynamic objects or using them more... each class has overhead for it's description, but I think they may have less overhead for member accesses. I have not tested this either way, though.
Either trim or copy out any methods you are using from other libraries. If you are using Flex... sorry, you are pretty boned :(. Watch out for class references that pull in a whole bunch of unused classes: making a trimmed private library copy is useful here as well.
If you are willing to sacrifice code quality: you could try using class members instead of parameters for deep call heirachies. Look out for inner functions - there are a few situations that can cause bloat. Since names are included (once), even using shorter package, class and member names (not parameter or locals), and literals instead of constants, so only the value has to be emitted, not the member name as well (I am not sure about private members, or in sealed classes).
Graphics should always be the first suspect in cases of file bloat. If you have images, reduce quality or size, or see if a different format yields smaller file sizes. Don't copy-paste vector drawings, put them in a movie clip or graphic and put that in other places. Also, if you have any sort of complicated vector art, smoothing can help reduce their complexity.
Action script can be reduced just as you would reduce any other code. Look for repetitions and other places that can be cut out. But honestly file size is not impacted much by code.
Somewhat related question: Why does my SWF file size not decrease when reducing content?
Runtime shared library
You can do couple of things..
save images as external links and load those dynamically(there is a trade off)
check SIZE REPORT , track down and trim down the large embedded files
Increase the compression of the graphics (such as lowering the jpg quality) and look for parts of your code that are not being used and see if you can trim or refactor.
Related
My goal is to write a program (e.g. in Python or C++) which takes as input a JPG file (e.g. tux.jpg) and make tiny changes to it, such that it outputs many different images (maybe a thousand images or even more), but in a way that all these images, while having different hash, look almost the same visually, i.e. the changes should have the least impact to the original image as possible.
I first though to play around with the jpg header but that might not be enough to make the many thousands of different pictures I want.
As a naive way, I thought to flip a random bit in the file, but that bit can possibly result in a less than desirable result, which can be seen especially in small pictures (e.g. a dark pixel in the white space in the tux picture). Ideally, I would like to change a random pixel with a "neighboring" color, such that the two resulting pictures have almost no visual difference.
For this purpose, I read the JPG codec example but I find it very confusing and hard to understand. Can someone help me what my program should look for as it parses the file in binary format and how to change a random pixel with a "neighboring" color?
You can change the comment part of the file by playing with the file header. A simple way to do that is to use a ready made open source program that allows you to put the comment of your choice, example HLLO repeated 8 times. That should give you 256 bits to play with. You can then determine the place where the HLLO pattern is located in the file using a hex editor. You then load the data in memory and start changing these 32 bytes and calculate the hash each time to get a collision (a hash that matches)
By the time you find a collision, the universe will have ended.
Although in theory doable, it's practically impossible to crack SHA256 in a reasonable amount of time, standard encryption protocols would be over and hackers would be enjoying their time.
I am posting this question by request of a Firebase engineer.
I am using the Camera2 API in conjunction with Firebase-mlkit vision. I am using both barcode and on-platform OCR. The things I am trying to decode are mostly labels on equipment. In testing the application I have found that trying to scan the entire camera image produces mixed results. The main problem is that the field of view is too wide.
If there are multiple bar codes in view, firebase returns multiple results. You can sort of work around this by looking at the coordinates and picking the one closest to the center.
When scanning text, it's more or less the same, except that you get multiple Blocks, many times incomplete (you'll get a couple of letters here and there).
You can't just narrow the camera mode, though - for this type of scanning, the user benefits from the "wide" camera view for alignment. The ideal situation would be if you have a camera image (let's say for the sake of argument it's 1920x1080) but only a subset of the image is given to firebase-ml. You can imagine a camera view that has a guide box on the screen, and you orient and zoom the item you want to scan within that box.
You can select what kind of image comes from the Camera2 API but firebase-ml spits out warnings if you choose anything other than YUV_420_488. The problem is that there's not a great way in the Android API to deal with YUV images unless you do it yourself. That's what I ultimately ended up doing - I solved my problem by writing a Renderscript that takes an input YUV, converts it to RGBA, crops it, then applies any rotation if necessary. The result of this is a Bitmap, which I then feed into either the FirebaseVisionBarcodeDetectorOptions or FirebaseVisionTextRecognizer.
Note that the bitmap itself cases mlkit runtime warnings, urging me to use the YUV format instead. This is possible, but difficult. You would have to read the byte array and stride information from the original camera2 yuv image and create your own. The object that comes from camear2 is unfortunately a package-protected class, so you can't subclass it or create your own instance - you'd essentially have to start from scratch. (I'm sure there's a reason Google made this class package protected but it's extremely annoying that they did).
The steps I outlined above all work, but with format warnings from mlkit. What makes it even better is the performance gain - the barcode scanner operating on an 800x300 image takes a tiny fraction as long as it does on the full size image!
It occurs to me that none of this would be necessary if firebase paid attention to cropRect. According to the Image API, cropRect defines what portion of the image is valid. That property seems to be mutable, meaning you can get an Image and change its cropRect after the fact. That sounds perfect. I thought that I could get an Image off of the ImageReader, set cropRect to a subset of that image, and pass it to Firebase and that Firebase would ignore anything outside of cropRect.
This does not seem to be the case. Firebase seems to ignore cropRect. In my opinion, firebase should either support cropRect, or the documentation should explicitly state that it ignores it.
My request to the firebase-mlkit team is:
Define the behavior I should expect with regard to cropRect, and document it more explicitly
Explain at least a little about how images are processed by these recognizers. Why is it so insistent that YUV_420_488 be used? Maybe only the Y channel is used in decoding? Doesn't the recognizer have to convert to RGBA internally? If so, why does it get angry at me when I feed in Bitmaps?
Make these recognizers either pay attention to cropRect, or state that they don't and provide another way to tell these recognizers to work on a subset of the image, so that I can get the performance (reliability and speed) that one would expect out of having to ML correlate/transform/whatever a smaller image.
--Chris
i am developing the code for a simple game in AS3 and i have all the graphic assets made by a designer.
He wants all the textual messages (i.e. win, lose, lives, etc.) to be done exactly as in the original photoshop drawing, they have lots of visual fx on them.
Since these messages inside the game are dynamic, I tried to use normal textfields and replicate the visual fx with Flash filters, but the result is not even comparable.
I think i could try to export from photoshop a spritesheet with the all the image characters, or the single image characters one by one, and replace my old textfields with sprites/movieclips in which i would load the specific image characters based on the string i need to show to the enduser, but i don't know precisely how to do it.
Does anyone have some hints on how to achieve this result? Better to use a separate class and image library? I googled online hoping to find some class or method alike to customize a little for my needs, but unfortunately i haven't found anything!
You could add all the graphics to the library exporting them with each name.
Than call them when needed creating a MC. If useful, you could store the names in an array and use it to simplify your script (it depends on usage)
Ok, after some more research, i found out my main problem in not finding answers to my problem was the terms of research i was using.
I was erroneously looking for "AS3 string replace with images" or "text replace with images in Flash", while the correct question was: "how to use a BITMAP FONT in AS3".
I was sure someone else had to do what i'm trying to do (like in old games where texts were all image sprites) but i didn't know how to find it!
So, this is the solution i found, i still have to refine the workflow but it's a good starting point:
Create a custom Bitmamp font using the SHOEBOX tool in conjunction with photoshop, where you will be able to apply all the raster fx you want (here's the tutorial: http://renderhjs.net/shoebox/bitmapFont.htm)
You will obtain a .fnt file (descriptor) and a .png image (font characters atlas)
You will need to flip the png image vertically: apparently, a lot of bitmap text engines work with flipped characters, and i found this one to be working like this as well
Once you have these files, use the BMFontRenderer AS3 class to embed your bitmap font into an AS3 project of your choice (tutorial here: http://blog.bengarney.com/2011/12/07/fast-bitmap-fonts-in-flash/)
I hope it will be useful for others who may need to replace standard text in Flash with font images.
Ask a question .. images resources of the flash game , How should I load? I use the Loader class, but some people use the embedded resources.Can you tell me in which case use "Loader" class and in which case use "[Embed]"?
It all depends on the game requirements. You have to have in mind that if you use Loaders your game will not work in offline mode (without internet access), which in some cases is critical (i.e. a flash game for a mobile device).
If the final file size isn't a problem, then you should always embed your assets and load only dynamic resources (i.e. ads). You can always use assets libraries to store the resources and to reduce the initial loading time for the application.
Using the embed tag literally compiles that resource into the final SWF output. So it's a matter of how much preloading you want to do and how big you want your initial swf to be. If you are embedding some small thumbnail images or sound files, this may be okay to an extent. But if you embed all of your assets or large assets, well you can figure it out from there, you're going to merge that file size + the size of any other files into 1 file, which is also meant to be your user interface. Keep assets external (for the most part) and dynamically load them in. There might be specific cases as mentioned here in other answers where it is required but unless otherwise dictated, organize your assets and simply load/unload them as needed. The other nice thing about using the Loader class is that is gives you more control over destroying the object from memory than anything else. You can call the unloadAndStop(Boolean CallGarbageCollector) method and directly request the VM to forcefully stop, delete and clean that object up. Anyway hope this clarifies things.
If you would submit your game to Kongregate or Newgrounds, they have strict rules - game should consist of one file. If you host game yourself, you may do as you wish, but take into account that loading needs time and your game find that some resource needed and not yet loaded.
As a rule of thumb, if your game is small, embed everything. If resources are vast and not used simultaneously, think about loading dynamically - this is much harder but allows for faster game start.
Hey everyone,
I'm trying to create a program in Java that can read numbers of the screen, and also recognise images on the screen. I was wondering how i can achieve this?
The font of the numbers will always be the same. I have never programmed anything like this before, but my idea of how it works is to have the program take a screenshot, then overlay the image of the numbers with the section of the screenshot image and check if they match, repeating this for each numbers. If this is the correct way to do this, how would i put that in code.
Thanks in advance for any help.
You could always train a neural net to do it for you. They can get pretty accurate sometimes. If you use something like Matlab it actually has capabilities for that already. Apparently there's a neural network library for java (http://neuroph.sourceforge.net/) although I've never used it personally.
Here's a tutorial about using neuroph: http://www.certpal.com/blogs/2010/04/java-neural-networks-and-neuroph-a-tutorial/
You can use a neural network, support vector machine, or other machine learning construct for this. But it will not do the entire job. If you do a screen shot, you are going to be left with a very large image that you will need to find the individual characters on. You also need to deal with the fact that the camera might not be pointed straight at the text that you want to read. You will likely need to use a series of algorithms to lock onto the right parts of the image and then downsample it in a way that size becomes neutral.
Here is a simple Java applet I wrote that does some of this.
http://www.heatonresearch.com/articles/42/page1.html
It lets you draw on a relatively large area and locks in on your char. Then it recognizes it. I am using the alphabet, but digits should be easier. The complete Java source code is included.
One simpler approach could be to use template matching. If the fonts are same, and/or the size (in pixels)is known, then simple template matching can do the job for you. ifsize of input is unknown, you might have to create copies of images at different scales and do the matching at each scale.
One with the extreme value(highest or lowest depending on the method you follow for template matching) is your result.
Follow this link for details