Actionscript 3 :: Flash: When Does Flash Stop Rendering And How To Keep Active
Jan 6, 2010
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.
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.
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?
How do you get the information bar to stop blocking the active X control for a flash movie in IE.when I am in fire fox, it just starts the flash movie. Right in the HTML page. But with IE, the info bar at the top pops up, and blocks my flash movie.Then you have to click on it, and say that you want to activate the active X on the page. Is there anyway to stop this from happening. I remember, using IE, that not all flash is blocked, just the stuff that I make.
I have buttons in my container that fade out at one point of my website. But they stay active as obviously the movie that is playing at that point is loaded into the same container. How do I stop the buttons from being active?
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 am working with two versions of flash storybooks that we sell.. flash 7 and flash 10 active x.5 of our storybooks are in version 7 and the other 2 are in 10. I am not sure if we have the original project files or not, so I will assume we don't. Is there any way to unassemble the flash 7 storybook (.exe), update it to flash 10, and build it? I am a programmer but hardly know anything about flash.
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?
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.
I 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.
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:
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
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?
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.
I 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.
We 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?
From 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.)
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)
In 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.
