This article is for the AS3 developer who’s decided to switch to Unity and doesn’t know the first thing about programming in C#. It’ll walk you through the basics of C# to get you oriented and productive.
Archive for category AS3
From Flash to Unity
Jul 21
Today marks a big change for JacksonDunstan.com and the Tip of the Week e-mail list. After writing about AS3, Flash, and AIR for five years and 317 articles, I’m going to start writing about C# and Unity3D. Today I have posted two articles. The first talks about why I’m switching from Flash to Unity and the second is the beginning of a series of transitional articles entitled From AS3 to C#. Read on for the first article.
Many modern strongly-typed languages have introduced a way for you to not have to type a variable’s type. In C#, you can use var instead of the actual type. In C++, you use auto. AS3 has a similar feature with it’s “untyped” type: *. In those other languages, var and auto are syntax sugar that the compiler replaces with the actual type. Will the AS3 compiler and/or Flash Player do the same for us? Today’s article finds out if it’s safe to skip the type and just use *.
Four years ago I tested the functional programming-style methods of Array and Vector: every, filter, forEach, map, and some. In that article I showed that these functions are much slower than doing the same task through traditional loops. Today’s article seeks to improve the performance of the functional methods while retaining readability by using ASC 2.0′s [Inline] metadata. Can homemade versions of these functions beat the built-in ones from Adobe? Read on to find out!
flash.utils.describeType has been around since Flash 9 and is the standard way to find out interesting information about a Class type, including its metadata/annotations. However, there’s a hidden function called describeTypeJSON that provides an interesting alternative. Since describeType is notoriously slow, could describeTypeJSON be the speedy alternative we’ve been looking for? Today’s article puts them to the test!
There are lots of ways to check the type of an object in AS3. These include the is operator, the deprecated instanceof operator, the constructor field, and a combination of getQualifiedClassName and getDefinitionByName. Which is fastest, cleanest, and most effective? Today’s article puts them all to the test to find out!
A Boolean in AS3 takes up four bytes of memory to store a single bit of information. It takes up 32x more memory than it needs. We can make better use of this memory and today’s article explains how.
When getSize() Lies
May 26
flash.sampler.getSize() is a handy tool for figuring out how much memory a class instance uses. However, it is often flat-out wrong. Today’s article tries it out on a variety of classes to find out which ones it works on and which ones it doesn’t.
