I’m back from a month off for winter break! Today I’ll start off with a very short article to ease back into things. Today I’ll cover a “gotcha” that got me recently and resulted in a bug report that was pretty tough to solve. Read on to see what it was.
Archive for category AS2
For Vs. While
Nov 27
I’ve recently been seeing more and more usage of while loops by those who I presume are interested in performance. I’ve always assumed that these was not faster than for loops, but today I am finding out.
Faster isNaN()
Nov 11
You cannot directly check if a value is NaN by comparing with it. AS3, AS2, and JavaScript therefore provide a useful isNaN() function to do this very check. However, it is very slow. Today I’ll show you a workaround that results in a faster isNaN():
Flexible If Syntax
Nov 2
This article is sort of a follow-up to my article on Flexible Loop Syntax. This was reported to my by a coworker who spotted the anomaly. I guess he had done with if the same sort of thing that I had done with for. Read on for a little insight into how the comma operator interacts with the if statement.
Repeatable Random
Oct 21
Everybody knows about Math.random(), and for good reason. It’s pretty much the way to get random numbers in AS3, AS2, and JavaScript other than bizarre alternatives like AS3’s BitmapData.noise(). However, it has one critical problem that arises when you want to repeat a certain test or prevent game cheaters from exploiting the randomizer until they get an “easy” setup or desirable outcome. This problem is the lack of repeatability.
Inline Math.ceil()
Oct 5
Math.ceil() is a common, mundane function that you likely call all the time. I know I do. If performance gets to be important and you have a Math.ceil() in some inner loop or frequently called function, consider inlining it. Below I’ll show you how and provide a test app showing you just how much CPU time you’ll save.
Curry Functions
Sep 28
In the midst of discussing my runnables technique for implementing function pointers over on the Rausch Generator Blog, I commented about the usefulness of the currying technique, mostly in callbacks. It occurred to me that I’ve been using a tiny helper class to curry functions for years in both AS2 and AS3, but that many people may have never stopped to write such a basic (in my opinion) class. So I figured I might as well re-implement the class and post it here.
With Blocks
Aug 28
While plainly documented by Adobe in the Flash 10 AS3 Docs, it seems as though few programmers know about the with statement. I don’t use them much personally, but when a coworker came across one in my code recently and was puzzled, I figured I would write a quick article to cover their usage.
Function Variables
Aug 19
AS3, AS2, and JavaScript have some strange rules regarding the initialization of variables. These are shocking and perhaps ridiculous to users of C and Java. This article covers one particularly insane quirk.
Fun With Dynamic Functions
Jul 17
Dynamic functions are a very useful feature of AS3 and JavaScript. Closures constantly come in handy for cleaner, more powerful code. Here’s a feature you might not know about them though.
