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It looks like flash 8 could be *considerably* faster for complex vectors with gradients and alpha.
These two bitmap caching examples have been put together by some clever hacky dudes:
http://www.margaris.de/flash8/bitmap/bitmapcache.html
http://www.potapenko.com/tmp/test_8_flash.html
More examples of new features here:
http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=flash8
I'm now getting pretty excited....
Oh, words... should've brought... a poet...
This one I put together:
http://www.brokenbutton.com/f8test.html
yup,cacheAsBitmap can raise the performance you get when using vector graphics.
To be clear though,that mainly counts in when you don´t change any props of the graphic which influence its appearance.
so maximum speed difference is gained when you have a static vector graphic which is only changed in its x/y pos; as soon as you change props like rotation,height,width or have alpha changes applied,the speed increase isn´t that big anymore,as the graphic has to be cached again (fps even might drop in some cases then).
Yep, I've added rotation to that example. use pgdn and pgup.
If you switch caching on, it rotates SLOWER than when it's off, cos it's recaching the mc. Thing to do there is switch off caching when you want to apply other transformations.
yup,exactly; the new flash offers a series of features which in certain cases can massively improve performance,but content really has to be tailored in the right way to gain that extra performance.
I got a great performance improvement with my tile engine when using flash player 8 as opposed to FP 7 (only about 20 % cpu usage!! on my 500 mgz pc when moving 15 x 10 tiles each with a width of 30).
maybe my action/rpg dream will come true (my hopes are not to high though :) )
Tile Engines
1. Using FP 8, tiles are vector drawn
2. Using FP 8, tiles are bitmaps
3. Using FP 7, tiles are vector drawn
4. Using FP 7, tiles are bitmaps
There was some difference there, so are the individual tiles bitmap-cached? Hard to comapre the different players here, cos I just have fp8 beta installed.
=) its a bit faster,yeah,did you use something else than cacheAsBitmap and export to f8?
For the FP8 versions, I only used cacheAsBitmap (for both the vector and bitmap tiles, I guess it only works with the tiles that are vector drawn, but there is still a performance improvement with the bitmap tiles too) and I exported to F8.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsamson
The FP7 versions are just exported using the normal FP7 player.
It almost certainly does speed up bitmaps, because once they've been cached, they can't be stretched or rotated without recaching, just like vectors. Normal bitmaps can be transformed in this way, so presumably they're quite a bit slower.
Am I understanding this right by assuming the bitmap caching happens only when a bitmap or vector has something done to them that is not just an x and y change?
I think you might just be right. This opens up a whole lot of possibilities doesn't it.Quote:
Originally Posted by UnknownGuy
It happens as long as it's only x and y translation.Quote:
Originally Posted by UnknownGuy
Anything else and it has to re-cache.
This feature could chew an awful lot of RAM...
Does this caching boost performance where you're using a lot of bitmap source images as well, or is the speed boost only from the removal of vector calculations after the vectors are all cached?
I doubt you could do that first example as smoothly with a series of prerendered 32 bit bitmaps in flash 7, but maybe i underestimate the speed of this PC...
>> This feature could chew an awful lot of RAM...
I don't think it will be that bad. I suspect they might just use the internal video memory buffer memory. I suppose you could cache megs and megs of data, but even then, the video cards are capable of offloading that to system ram as needed so I doubt we will see any dramatic increase in memory usage for the average game.
Now if people start texture maping and such, that might all change :)
Well, if task manager is anything to go by, the first two examples take up another 4-5meg of memory when caching is activated. It goes back down again afterwards, which is a relief.
The example i posted shoots up by about 40 meg. Though in that example, there's 5 huge movieclips with lots of alpha, so it's not really a surprise.
I wonder what happens when the memory gets maxed out? I'm guessing the caching just gets switched off, so it slows down again.
They might just switch to using virtual memory when your RAM is maxed out, so that it uses your hard disk space instead of your RAM - obviously, this is slower, but it still works.
Yeah, I think windows does this automatically for any application.
lesli_felix: If you were to change your FLA to use that same image as a PNG with alpha, any idea what the performance would be? I ask because I want to see how close we can get to your performance with F7 using PNGs. Thanks!