Friday, February 23, 2007
test, test, test
Hi folks,

while inbetween two bigger projects (that surely will leave no room for just "playing" around), I wanted to get my head into a new game. The idea was fresh, and highly motivated I started to code some samples in order to see if the flash player could handle it at all.

Nope, it couldn't.

The goal was to be able to move over a "3d" landscape, textured was my first plan, coloured is what I ended up with.

And no, it *wasn't* code excution speed. So two weeks were wasted trying different approaches to achieve the same result, but somehow failed. While the code took about 1 at a high rate 3 ms, flash's graphic renderer consumed between 30 and 90 ms.

As the stat's say the code is fast enough, I didn't see the point of moving to AS3, though it might make the whole thing possible - but for now I can happily ignore all the AS3 buzz and see that I get things done.

shish!

Anyway, I hope I be able to set up a little example swf, because the idea still isn't dead - it just needs some more thinking :)

nGFX

Friday, February 23, 2007 11:38:05 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Trackback
 Thursday, February 08, 2007
New blog, new post, same old geek
Well let me kick my posting off here with a bit of a techy one.

Just finished work on my profiler, which looks all transparent and nice.



It works by replacing the trace() command. As I use mtasc for development rather than the Flash IDE you have the issue of not having a trace command as such ( No IDE, so no IDE based trace window ).
mtasc gets around this allowing you to overwrite the existing trace command with your own goodness. I've been using alcon as an alternative trace since moving over to mtasc, and it's pretty sweet. It uses a local connection to spit the data out to it's own window, so no nasty textfields in your swf, and it works with movies embedded on a site. Using a local connection means the output is displayed a bit slower than Flash spits it out, but to me that's no big deal, so long as I get to see what's causing the problem I can wait :)

Anyway in the brief moments of downtime I've been working on my own version, tailored to suit my needs. As you can see from the screeny it can output a fair bit of info from a trace command ( Such as the line number, calling package etc. ).
I've also copied the coloured output feature from alcon, so trace("test",2) outputs in a different colour, which is handy.
A colour value of 3 is classed as a fatal error, and if the flag's set then all output stops, so it's like a breakpoint and saves you have to scroll through a lot of output checking for that line which is badly broken.

It also supports trace("_dump",object), which spits out all the properties in an object ( Also covers the type, eg testFlag:Boolean=true; ), as well as trace("_dumpMC",mc) which displays the most relevant movieclip properties.

As it's a profiler and not just a trace replacement, it also handles trace("_profileStart"); trace("_profileStop"); and trace("_profileEnd"); ( Which stops the profiling all together ). When the end command is called it outputs all the methods which have been profiled, the number of times they've been called, the quickest they ran ( In ms ), the longest time they took, and the average.
So hopefully with this I'll be able to find bottlenecks quickly and speed them up before they become a performance issue. It also means testing different approaches can be done quickly to see exactly which way is quicker in a given situation.

Squize.

Thursday, February 08, 2007 1:06:46 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Trackback