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.
Posts Tagged dynamic
Above all others, there is one article I refer back to most: 2009’s Function Performance. It was updated for Flash Player 10.1 and 10.2, but not 10.3, 11.0, 11.1, or 11.2. Today I’m updating this article for Flash Player 11.2, adding some missing function types, and including a set of graphs to make for the ultimate function performance reference.
One of the very nice features of AS3 (and AS2 and JavaScript for that matter) is that you can dynamically access the fields of any object. This leads to much more dynamic code since you no longer need to know what field to access at compile time. As we’ve often seen with other dynamic features, this can come at a steep cost in terms of performance. Today we’ll see just how slow accessing fields this way is to get a good idea of just how much performance we give up when using this feature.
AS3 has an interesting feature that is sometimes used to great effect: dynamic classes. These classes can have fields added and removed to them and used like any other field. You can even make your own dynamic classes with the dynamic keyword. However, all of this fancy functionality comes at a steep performance cost. How steep? Read on to see just how steep.
Quite often I have wanted to iterate over the public fields (and getters) of an arbitrary object. Sometimes this is for debugging purposes so I can print out the state of an object, particularly one that has all public fields like a C/C++ structure. Sadly, this is not possibly (with most objects) using the for-in and for-each loops we’ve come to know and love. So I made a utility function that I’m sharing with you all today. UPDATE: getProperties now supports MovieClip derivatives such as library symbols from an FLA
I recently received an e-mail from asking which is faster: a DisplayObjectContainer or a Vector of DisplayObject. To ask this is to question whether or not we can do better than the Flash Player’s native container of DisplayObjects using AS3. It turns out that we can. Read on for several ways to improve on DisplayObjectContainer‘s speed.
I was reminded about the flash.sampler API by Grant Skinner’s recent post about it. While only available in the debug player, it can still tell us some valuable information about what goes on in the release player. Today I’m using the getSize function to find out how much memory overhead various classes impose, even when they are empty.
Welcome to the second part of this series on dynamic access. Last time we covered indexing arrays and vectors. This time we’ll talk about dynamic classes and plain objects. These are definitely something to watch out for when writing performance-critical code.