My Flash Resource - New Ideas and News for Applying Flash to Complex Gaming Apps

When developing for any device or console, such as the PSP, that has limited resources you should test your program early and as often as possible until you get a feel for what the device can handle without becoming too sluggish. Speed is very important on gaming consoles otherwise you loose playability and people won’t want to play your game or use your program.

Here are some quick tips that I found on the Adobe site on how to develop for speed with Flash:

• Avoid expensive math operations such as looping structures, random calculations, and collision detection. Appoximations may be used instead for some operations.
• Use keyframe-based animation rather than code-based animation.
• Instead of dynamically attaching and removing movieClips from the library, just move them off-stage or set them invisible.
• When using vector graphics avoid using gradients, alpha colors, and/or shape tweens. Bitmaps are recommended if using an optimized format like 8-bit PNG with transperancies. An advantage of using bitmaps is the ability to set the quality of the movie to ‘Low’ (fscommand2(”SetQuality”, “low”);) which will allow your program to run much quicker.

In the next part I will explain how to embed video the old way since we’re dealing with Flash Player 6.

This is the first part of a multi-part article dealing with using Flash in the PSP gaming console.

Flash Player 6 is available to all PSP’s that have been updated with firmware version 2.70 or higher. This update originally came out in 2006 so its safe to assume that most PSP’s would have this capability. In this article I’m going to outline the specifications and limitations that you need to consider when creating Flash games and applications for the PSP.

Specifications:

Flash Player: Version 6 r65
RAM: 2MB
Suggested Frame Rate: 18-24 fps depending on complexity (layered sound, complex math, graphics, animations)
Screen Size: 480 x 272 pixels
Font: Device font (comes in 5 sizes only)

Limitations:

• Does not support FLV Flash Video. This mean that you cannot use progressive downloading or streaming of video like what is used in Google Video and YouTube. However, you can still embed video which I will discuss in a later section.
• Limited resources. This means you have to optimize your design efficiently to get the most out of these resources. Techniques developed by Flash Lite programmers can be very useful in these designs. You need to test early and test often to make sure your not putting too much strain on the PSP.
• SharedObjects are not supported. This means you can’t save to the local device. A server could be used if the user has an internet connection.
• Cannot use XMLSocket for a continuous connection with a server.
• Cannot communicate with Flash Communication Server or Flash Media Server.

Stay tuned for the next part which will deal with some specific techniques that will lead to successful implementation of Flash in PSP’s.