As I discovered in the previous articles, loaded bitmaps are stored in memory in two forms: the compressed PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, GIF file and the uncompressed RGBA pixels. If you don’t use the pixels, Flash Player will reclaim its memory and then uncompress it if you use the bitmap later on. However, if you do plan to use the bitmap, isn’t the compressed file data just memory overhead? Today’s article will show you how to dump this unused file data and save a bunch of memory.
Archive for January, 2013
It came to my attention in the comments of Preloading Bitmap Decompression that Flash Player would actually free the decompressed bitmap memory if you didn’t make active use of it, similar to garbage collection. So if you followed my strategy from that article to preload a bitmap, it may have been un-preloaded for you by Flash Player! Today’s article shows you how to work around this little problem.
Strings and integers sort differently. Unfortunately, this became a problem for me during some recent experiments with Starling. It could be a problem for you too in a variety of situations. Today we’ll look at a workaround I’ve developed to solve this problem, which isn’t nearly as straightforward as you might think.
Spriter is a tool for creating sprite animations out of multiple images. By moving, rotating, and scaling them over a timeline you can create much more efficient 2D animations than traditional full-frame animation. While Flash animation has worked similarly for years, it’s largely incompatible with the Stage3D API that is quickly becoming mandatory to achieve adequate performance. Today’s article will show you how to use Spriter in your Stage3D-powered Flash app via a Starling and some custom classes I’ve created.