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.