As I discovered in the previous articles, loaded bitmaps are stored in memory in two forms: the compressed PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, GIF file and the uncompressed RGBA pixels. If you don’t use the pixels, Flash Player will reclaim its memory and then uncompress it if you use the bitmap later on. However, if you do plan to use the bitmap, isn’t the compressed file data just memory overhead? Today’s article will show you how to dump this unused file data and save a bunch of memory.
Keeping Bitmaps Decompressed
It came to my attention in the comments of Preloading Bitmap Decompression that Flash Player would actually free the decompressed bitmap memory if you didn’t make active use of it, similar to garbage collection. So if you followed my strategy from that article to preload a bitmap, it may have been un-preloaded for you by Flash Player! Today’s article shows you how to work around this little problem.
String-Sortable Integers
Strings and integers sort differently. Unfortunately, this became a problem for me during some recent experiments with Starling. It could be a problem for you too in a variety of situations. Today we’ll look at a workaround I’ve developed to solve this problem, which isn’t nearly as straightforward as you might think.
Rendering Spriter Sprites With Starling
Spriter is a tool for creating sprite animations out of multiple images. By moving, rotating, and scaling them over a timeline you can create much more efficient 2D animations than traditional full-frame animation. While Flash animation has worked similarly for years, it’s largely incompatible with the Stage3D API that is quickly becoming mandatory to achieve adequate performance. Today’s article will show you how to use Spriter in your Stage3D-powered Flash app via a Starling and some custom classes I’ve created.
Handling Stage3D Context Loss
Context loss with Stage3D is real and will instantly take down your 3D scene. It’s an unavoidable problem, but one that many programmers still don’t handle gracefully. How does it occur? Why does it matter? How can you handle it so your app continues to function well? Today’s article explores the topic of Stage3D context loss so you can keep your 3D scene alive and well.
Preloading Bitmap Decompression
Since they were introduced way back in Flash Player 8, bitmaps have become a core feature in almost all Flash apps. The way you handle them—creation, operations, and destroying—is one of the most important factors determining your app’s performance. Today’s article shows one little-known trick to help out the performance of loading and using bitmaps.
Three Interesting Discoveries
Today’s article is about three totally unrelated discoveries I’ve recently made in AS3. These answer three questions I’ve recently had. Should you cache the object you’re looping over with a for-each loop as a local variable? Can you clear a Dictionary or Object with a for-in loop? Is it faster to write your own version of Vector.indexOf? All of these questions are answered in today’s article!
System RAM and VRAM Explained
I’ve mentioned the concept of VRAM (video memory) in a few articles, but I still find constant confusion among readers of this site as well as coworkers and colleagues in day-to-day work with Stage3D. Today’s article will hopefully clear up the differences, dispel some myths, and help you make the best use of both of them.
Using ATF Is Harder Than You Might Think
Using Adobe’s new compressed texture format should be as simple as replacing some PNG and JPEG images with ATFs their tools created, but it’s not. If you don’t know what you’re doing, the process can be pretty confusing. Today’s article walks you through the steps to upgrade a Stage3D-using app to make use of ATF textures.
Optimizing with Bit Twiddling Hacks
Stanford’s Sean Eron Anderson has a great page titled Bit Twiddling Hacks. This is a great resource for C programmers looking to employ bitwise operators (& | ^ ~ << <<< >> >>> etc.) to speed up their code. But what about AS3 programmers? We have bitwise operators too, but will the same tricks work for us? Today’s article ports some of these bit twiddling hacks to AS3 and tests to see if any ground is gained.