Today’s article is in response to the many requests to include Adobe AIR in the “Flash vs. HTML5” series of articles. While it’s not a browser-based competitor, it certainly is a competing platform on iOS and Android. So I’ve taken the “Stage3D vs. WebGL” test and packaged it as an AIR app. How does AIR compare? Read on to find out.
Posts Tagged bitmap
WebGL is not ready for prime time. It’s just not available on enough of the browsers people actually use for any mass-market game to seriously target it. But what if everybody used browsers that supported WebGL right now? Would it be competitive then? Today’s article explores that question to find out just what kind of game you could make today to take advantage of HTML5 and WebGL and compares it to the performance you’d see had you gone with Flash’s Stage3D hardware acceleration.
Flash (mostly) won the first bitmap test against HTML5 but was then defeated once rotation and scaling entered the mix. Can Flash make a comeback by leveraging hardware acceleration via Stage3D? Today’s test finds out!
Normal bitmaps can be boring, so many games spice them up by rotating and scaling them for various purposes. Rotated characters can follow the curve of a 2D terrain in a game like Dragon, Fly!. Mario himself can scale up to huge size in New Super Mario Bros.. So today we continue the HTML5 vs. JavaScript series by testing the performance of rotating and scaling bitmaps to better compare the performance across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Will Flash maintain its lead? Read on to find out.
HTML5 is all the rage and a lot of Flash developers are either curious about it or have actually made the switch. But how does its performance stack up against Flash? That is a very complicated question, so we’ll begin today with just a simple test of the speed at which a lot of bitmaps can be drawn to the screen. Who will win? Read on to find out.
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.
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.
Since they were introduced way back in Flash Player 8, bitmaps have become a core feature in almost all Flash apps. The way you handle them—creation, operations, and destroying—is one of the most important factors determining your app’s performance. Today’s article shows one little-known trick to help out the performance of loading and using bitmaps.
Textures are usually simple bitmaps, but what if you wanted to use something more dynamic? How about a SWF you’ve created in Flash Professional? How about a Sprite or MovieClip you’ve created in code? Today’s article will show you how to do just that.
There’s no doubt that Flash 11’s new Stage3D API can produce some amazing results by giving us access to the power of the user’s video card/GPU. However, it’d be a mistake to blindly assume that it is always faster than the traditional Flash display list (i.e. Stage). Today’s article begins a series that discusses the topic of “draw calls” and how they heavily impact the performance of your application.