This should be of interest to some of you, certainly those of you who are interested in the games/motion graphics side of things.eople generally accept copyPixels as the standard for "blitting" but in some cases it gets absolutely blitzed by BMFill, namely when alpha isn't involved
View 2 RepliesI recently benchmarked the four most popular 3D engines (Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy, and Alternativa3D). The latest versions of each. Default settings, no mip mapping or any advanced features turned on.My main reason for doing this was to see how my 3D engine compared, performance wise. But I thought I would post the benchmarks, as I'm sure some of you might find them interesting, or useful, if you use Flash 3D engines.First I'll explain the benchmark and why I did this particular test. It's 1000 texture mapped planes, 100 by 100 pixels, each comprising of 2 polygons. So that's 2000 polygons and 4000 vertices being rendered per frame.Now my reason for doing textured mapping is because the vast majority of people are going to use texture mapping in their 3D work, as opposed to wireframe or vector filled polygons, so obviously the texture mapping performance is important.And I decided to do 1000 small planes, rather than just one huge 2000 polygon plane because this test has a significantly larger amount of vertices than 1 big plane, thus being more of a test for the 3D transformations.Also being that there are 1000 planes, it tests how quickly the engines traverse the list of models, do the transformations, and add them to the renderer each frame. Again, this is more of a task than having just 1 model.Now as for the results, funnily enough, they are pretty much ranked in terms of popularity Papervision being the clear winner, then Away3D, then Sandy, then Alternativa.I get 19fps for Papervision, about 11fps for Away3D, 7.5fps for Sandy, and a shocking 2.5fps for Alternativa.It's given me a new found respect for Papervision. It has very respectable performance, much faster than the rest in terms of raw poly pushing power. I previously thought PV was overrated, and it's success mainly due to great marketing etc, but no. From the demos etc, I thought away3D would be faster, but actually PV is almost twice as fast.It's impressive that they've created a very easy to use, versatile and user friendly engine, with pretty good performance to boot. I think underrated PV before, because I'd seen fairly simple things like a 3D menu, or some 3D images run at like 10 frames a second and use 75% of the CPU. In hindsight, this was obviously just some horrible programming, by people who didn't know what they were doing.
I thought I would stick up for Alternativa though. It might lose badly in terms of raw polygon pushing, but it's a very advanced engine, and goes about things in a different way. The reason it can handle those big scenes in the demos on their site is because of some fairly advanced clipping and dynamic triangulation, minimising the amount of polys being rendered at any one time. Particularly the dynamic triangulation. Objects that are further away have their polygons reduced dramatically, then more polygons are added when viewing up close, particularly at an angle.Kind of surprised about Sandy. Having a skim through the classes, it seems pretty well written and fairly lightweight and streamlined. Papervision seems a bit bloated in comparison. But PV's code is clearly far more efficient.I'd also like to say this doesn't mean you shouldn't use Away3D, Sandy, or Alternativa. Obviously I explained A3D above, and I know Away 3D has a lot of features that people like, and things generally look quite good in Away3D.
I am trying to find a way to render a Flash object, more specifically a Open Flash Chart, in the server, and save a screenshot of it to a temp file to embed it in on a PDF report.
I've found some solutions that use Javascript to generate a temp file in the browser, and then send it to the server (like here). However I need to generate reports automatically and send them as e-mail attachments, so I cannot render it using a browser.
I have a webpage containing 2 DIV containers hidden using CSS. The site has a Flash Movie embedded. I want to render the content of these hidden DIV containers from within the Flash movie.I'm using CS4?
HTML
<div id="sectionone">content</div>
<div id="sectiontwo">content</div>
CSS
hide sectionone div and sectiontwo div
FLASH
Display sectionone within flash movie when requested
I am trying to render an image with text and images that are on a .swf file. What i am doing is saving all the objects and their properties in an XML and then using imagemagick to render all that. the problem i am facing is that imagemagick treats fonts very different than Flash, so i don't get a perfect copy of what i see in the flash to what i see on the rendered image.
how to match font sizes between flash an imagemagick?
Here's my problem: I have a few display objects that are modified by a loop, and I would like flash to render exactly one frame at the end of each loop. Duration of a loop may vary unpredictably, thus a constant frame-rate won't do it.
I found a hack-ish way to render one frame at the end of each loop, using updateAfterEvent with a 0ms timer. Now I want to prevent Flash from rendering frames in the middle of the loop: this is a waste of time and ressources, and produces strange blinking effects. Setting the frame rate to 0 would be an easy solution, but stage.frameRate has a minimum value of 0.01.
Question 1: Is there a way to properly stop the standard rendering loop? A workaround will not be regarded as a valid answer, because what I'm currently doing is a pretty good workaround (1 frame every 100 seconds is bearable). Question 2: Is there a better way than updateAfterEvent to force rendering?
Has anyone ever encountered this weird, unique error I am gettingWhen I export my program to a SWF all the imported PNGs with alpha transparency (ie; soft edges) render totally wrong - no transparency, very blocky and pixelated. See the attached image for an example;this is out of the blue. Has exported fine recently.
View 1 RepliesI want to use small icons to play videos from within an HTML (CSS-styled) text field in AS3. I placed the image after the text, as you normally would. But it keeps getting bumped down to the next line. I'm worried that this is just another part of Flash's busted HTML rendering.
[code]...
I'm making a simple RSS reader in flash. I test the swf in Flash, it works perfectly. I publish the swf with html through Flash, and it works perfectly. However, when I incorporate the swf into a web site that I am currently developing, using swfobj 2.0 (dynamic) procedures (followed both by google code and lee's video tutorial on using swfobj 2.0), the html rendering does not work. I've tried copying the html code that comes from the Flash-published html, and paste that into the website I'm developing, but that straight out just doesnt work. I'm going to attach the AS3 code here. I pull the RSS xml info into flash, do a bit of string analysis to replace inactive links with active and cut out another snippet of the string, apply a style using an external css, and finally render as html.
Code: Select allvar loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
loader.load(new URLRequest("[URL]"));
var xml:XML;
function onDataComplete(e:Event):void {
xml = new XML(e.target.data);
var il:XMLList = xml.channel.item;
[Code] .....
Latest version of FF is used in both pics. Also, an image to illustrate what happens:
i have found that:
1. There has a subtle difference between a static text field in flash authoring tool which has been set to use the device font when it's got focus(state that user can type character in) and lose focus;
2. There also has a subtle difference between when it is being rendered in flash player and in flash authoring tool.(Note that the key factor here is setting the text field to use device font.)
I have XML written using PHP taken from a database, which flash then uses to print out iinto a flash file dynamic text box. It all works fine as required, apart from not rendering html tags properly within the textfield, such as <p> and <b>. Below is my php, wrapped in the CDATA tags:
[Code]......
the textfield (mytext) is obviously within movie clip - theMovie - movies. As i mentioned the text is getting printed out fine from the database, but it ends up being just one block of text without formatting, and the tags that should be html are being taken and written literally.
Is there anything glaringly obvious that I'm not including to make sure that <p> tags and <b> tags etc. are rendered correctly, rather than just writing them out as "<p>" in the textfield?
Without including swfobject.js can only swf files be loaded through html.And if so is there a common tag for all the browsers.
<object id="myMovieName" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000">
<param value="movie.swf" name="movie">
<param value="high" name="quality">
[code]...
I would like to use SWF files as source video data within a tool chain I am developing. The problem is, I can't seem to find a consistent way to convert them, and I'm concerned about the loss of quality that the conversion will introduce.
I actually even have Flash CS3, but the export process to anything other than swf is flaky at best. It does different things depending on what video format you export to, and doesn't seem to be consistent across Flash (fla) files.
The options I have come up with are:
1) integrate someone else's source code to parse/play back the swf files, and capture the output directly that way.
2) create some kind of frankenstein work flow using Air or Flex to play the swf and export each frame to an image format, and then read those into the application where I want the data.
Integrating someone else's code seems pretty gross to me. The code available that I can find is at least 2 Flash versions old, so I'd have to do a fair amount of work for this. And when Adobe releases the next version of Flash, I'll have to add support for the new features in myself anyways. Were I to write a player myself from scratch, using the SWF specifications Adobe has published (assuming everything is actually documented enough), I run into the same issue: continued maintenance on a regular basis. And for most likely undocumented (or slowly documented) features.
Creating a frankenstein work flow using Air/Flex seems like a smarter approach, but will be really cumbersome and most likely slow.
Has Adobe released source code for their player somewhere, or better yet, a (C++) library that I could use?
I'm making an arcade game in as3 and I want to draw pixely(unsmoothed by flash) lines. I'm drawing the pixels 'by hand'(not with flash's lineTo or anything) onto a bitmapdata object. The lines don't appear quite right though, when zoomed out the line is rendered 2 pixels thick at some parts. However by zooming it its apparent that the algorithm is fine and its not doubling the pixels. Changing the quality doesn't seem to change anything.
[Code]...
the following flash object placed in HTML, flash seems to be rendering good in FirefoxChrome, Safari but not in any version of IE!
View 4 RepliesI have an Actionscript project that was building using Flash cs3. Project have TextFields (Text engine: classic text, Text type: dynamic text). Since I upgraded to CS5 and published, I find out that my text not rendered. I use Font family Tahoma. And I just set Font family to Tahoma again and published. After that manipulations my text start render. But when somebody else try to open my project using same Flash CS5 IDE and just published that project again without any modification - none of my text is rendered again. And that going round in circles.
View 2 RepliesWe are building a flash based product where we need to create icons for various modules. we are having challenges in look and feel of the icons- what looks really good on Adobe Illustrator/ Photoshop looks jagged on flashPlayer. A challenge we have is that the overall screen aspect ratio and hence aspect for the icons which are relatively sized can change
we were told in discussions with some adobe folks that
a) we need to build icons which are square, and in multiples of 32 pixels.
b) use a png format
As per them, this way the pixelation is reduced and diagonal lines won't appear jagged- we still have an issue on rendering in flash player
i'm suddenly experiencing errors in font rendering in my project.the following image is a square sprite with a texture and 2 dynamic text fields as children.the text itself is correct. the bottom field is a 32-bit hexadecimal color ("H: 0xFFFFF4A1"), but as you can see some of the characters are stretched ("x", "4" and "1"). it's the same in the first text field which lists each color in ARGB format.
the font being used is Myriad Pro Condensed. i was originally using Myriad Pro Bold Condensed, which i was using for months, but suddenly yesterday the font became even crazier than what's visible here so i switched. now this font is being rendered incorrectly also.
i've validated the fonts.
i've deleted my ASO files.
i'm using cacheAsBitmapMatrix on the parent sprite object, but cacheAsBitmapMatrix is suppose to only affect mobile devices so i'm not sure why it would be rendering the font like this (if it's the problem) while running under ADL on my desktop.
newSwatch.cacheAsBitmapMatrix = new Matrix();
newSwatch.cacheAsBitmap = true;
this is how i'm calling the font, which is embedded in my library.
//Create Text Field
private function swatchTextField():TextField
{
var myFont:Font = new MyFont();
[code]....
UPDATE:this error was indeed not a problem with Flash but a bug Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.6.7 that affected the display and printing of some open-type fonts. [URL]
I have two separate projects I am working on, very basic, and the Input Text Box on one is only returning the value in HTML format... I cannot figure out for the life of me why.
The Input Text Box on the Stage has a variable assigned to it. I then have a button that checks the users input... the problem is, the input is being converted to HTML so the check is always failing. When I trace the variable it returns the following result[code]...
details of "XML driven flash tree structure"..that could be something related to the left pane of Windows Explorer and i need to add the data dynamically...is there any useful tutorials or documents for this?
View 1 RepliesI have a flash/Actionscript 3 application (swf). This application sends a message to a server every 2 seconds. However, in some browsers/operating systems (for example, safari in mac), the moment the browser loses focus, it stops sending these messages.I send these messages in a EVENT. ENTER_ FRAME loop, so every time the application is rendered I have the chance to send a message. My theory is that some browsers apperantly stop callling this method/stop rendering for some reason, because it has lost focus. However, I want to keep sending these messages. I already tried to use a Timer, an event that would be called every 2 seconds, but I read somewhere (and my tests seem to agree) that this timer is also connected to the rendering/frame entering, so that timed function will also not be executed.
View 2 RepliesFrom here I read that the flash player software renderer only draws every pixel once, the page says something like this "Using the software renderer, each pixel is drawn only once, so there is no penalty no matter how many graphical elements are covering each other at that pixel location. " I was wondering what are the implications of this, does this mean that flash player has some sort or occlusion testing inbuilt yes it may not be culling the occluded triangles but it does not seem to render it.
How later on, I came across this page which talks about culling. If I decide to render objects in a 3D world do I have to implement my own culling code or will the flash player software renderer. do it for me
I am working on a large project and I would like some advices about improving the rendering performance when scrolling some content.I have a large sprite with a lot of content that I need to scroll and the problem that I am encountering is that when scrolling this big sprite, the rendering of the Flash Player seems to slow down and the movement is choppy.
I wrote a custom scrollbar class that simply updates the target sprite y or x properties on an enter frame event.The large sprite that I am scrolling mainly contains other sprites that have drawn shapes, loaded bitmaps and text fields.
Considering that I am simply moving the sprite, there are no other animations happening, nor other intensive processes at the same time, I do not think that it should be that resource intensive as to slow down the Flash Player that much. What can I do to improve the performance when scrolling the sprite ?(Just to give a rough approximation, the sprite that I am scrolling contains around 20-30 sprites with drawn shapes, 2-5 loaded bitmaps, 5-10 text fields.)
Is there a major issue with rendering Flash in Safari?
I have search for a way to display, for example, Adobe Home Page in Safari and be able to see all the menus "on top" and have not found a solution.
I have tried setting wmode to either opaque or transparent but no change.
I am using the latest download of Safari (vs 4.0.4[531.21.10]) on Windows 7.
what I want to do is render some HTML inside my Flash object. My problem is that this isn't just htmlText (for which I could use a textArea object), but text and images. Is there a component / object I can use inside Flash to render this HTML segment on the fly, or would I have to write my own HTML interpreter more-or-less (which I could do, thats just the last resort if I can't find a quicker way to do it)
View 3 RepliesIn Actionscript 3, you quickly learn that using vector graphics is a guaranteed way to inflict massive damage to the performance of your project. Using a combination of Bitmap, its bitmapData property and its copyPixels() method in place of all vector graphics will yield a ridiculous performance boost and is essential for people like myself developing games within Flash. Beyond this I'm not really sure what the next major things that I should be targeting and attempting to optimize are.
I do use a lot of the inbuilt trigonometry functions, but they don't seem to affect it all that much. I know there are some libraries that optimize mathematics with some approximation methods and similar, but so far I haven't found these necessary. Are there any other massive known points I should be looking at? I'm more referring to the inbuilt things that I should be careful of (like avoiding vector rendering) rather than how to improve my own coding style.
I'm working on generating some planets and moons for a 2d project im working on, these will generate planets procedurally that look somewhat realistic.
Anybody got any tips on improving this or optimising this?, it looks very flat i feel.
[Code]...
I have a flash/Actionscript 3 application (swf). This application sends a message to a server every 2 seconds. However, in some browsers/operating systems (for example, safari in mac), the moment the browser loses focus, it stops sending these messages.
I send these messages in a EVENT.ENTER_FRAME loop, so every time the application is rendered I have the chance to send a message. My theory is that some browsers apperantly stop callling this method/stop rendering for some reason, because it has lost focus. However, I want to keep sending these messages.
I already tried to use a Timer, an event that would be called every 2 seconds, but I read somewhere (and my tests seem to agree) that this timer is also connected to the rendering/frame entering, so that timed function will also not be executed.
how to emulate Smooth font rendering option from Photoshop in Flash/Flex?'ve tried different settings for advanced rendering (antiAliasType, gridFitType and friends) but not much luck so far.
View 2 RepliesI'm new to flash but have plenty of experience developing games, so when I started in flash I ignored pretty much everything that flash could do and just created a buffer the same size as my flash movie and drew my game direct to that with copyPixels. Now what I want to do is to add a menu to the game and it seems sensible to do make use of flash a little more. I can build a menu no problems in a .fla but can anyone tell me how I can render it over the top of my game?
View 2 Replies