A couple of years ago, I created an object pooling utility for a games project I was building in AS3. Since then, I’ve used it quite a few times, in order to speed up apps and improve resource management, easing the load on the garbage collector by reusing objects instead of recreating them. Continue reading Loan Shark – fast object pooling utility
Tag Archives: source code
SWFIdle – simple flash idling utility
If you’re still churning out Flash banners, please use this!
I created this simple utility, called SWFIdle, to enable the Flash Player to lower its CPU usage while the user is not interacting with it. Since it’s possible to have multiple Flash instances embedded in one page (for example, a game and a couple of banners), I recommend using this in your projects, so that Flash instances needn’t fight for CPU and give Flash a worse name than it has already 😉
I know there’s the hasPriority embed attribute now. But:
- That assumes you have access to the HTML that embeds your SWF
- If no other players are present, it has no effect
- There’s still usually little reason to be running your SWF at a high framerate if the user isn’t interacting with it
- Flash banners with wastefully unoptimised drawing routines are probably one of the key reasons that Flash got poo-pooed off of mobile platforms and disabled on everyone’s laptops – CPU usage = battery usage!
How to embed an entire asset SWF and get symbols from it
The problem
You want to embed an entire SWF, full of assets, into a class and retrieve individual symbols from it – but you don’t want to have to embed each asset individually.
The solution
SWFAsset – a couple of lines of code and you’re away.