Squeezing More Juice Out of the Flash Player

Squeezing More Juice Out of the Flash Player: "

In this tutorial you’ll build an extreme particle system whilst learning how to squeeze more efficient goodness out of the Flash Player than you ever thought possible!

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Final Result

Here are a couple of examples of what we’ll be working towards:

EPILEPSY WARNING:
Please don’t view this demo if you are likely to suffer from epileptic attacks or loss of consciousness, particularly when looking at some types of strong flashing lights, rapid succession of images, simple geometric shapes, flashes or explosions.

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Introduction: What Will You Learn?

Many users, from beginners to advanced, can still be seen using less than efficient Actionscript 3.0. In all likelyhood, this is because the efficient ways are made to sound a bit more difficult and aimed at highly advanced users. This tutorial will show you that these methods can be used by everyone, and they’re more useful than you may think!

The aim of this tutorial is to let you tackle those tasks that require working with a lot of data, very fast, with ease.

Helpful Hint: This tutorial will feature a lot of coding so I recommend using a more user friendly coding interface. I recommend FlashDevelop, it has some of the best code hinting around and best of all, it’s completely free! But I’m sure most of you will just copy and paste if do anything at all :)

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Step 1 Check out That FPS!

At the heart of making all things efficient in the Flash Player is the FPS (Frames Per Second) of your SWF. The proffered target of your SWF can be set in the Flash Professional interface or, a new feature in Actionscript 3.0, you can change the FPS of the stage at runtime.

stage.frameRate = 30;
trace(stage.frameRate); //30

However, this will only ever get and set the target FPS (what the Flash Player will attempt to play at), which makes it pretty useless for preformance testing. You might think that the lovely folks over at Adobe would made a nice neat way to find you real FPS but, nope. You’ve got to do the math for yourself. Let’s take a look.

FPS can be defined as the time difference between the current frame and the last.
So all we need is some way to track the time difference from this frame to the previous frame of the SWF[...]