March 21st, 2010 by Mims H Wright
This isn’t a new article, but it touches on a topic I’ve heard a lot about recently. That is, pixel ‘blitting‘. Blitting is an old school process used in sprite-based games of essentially erasing a spot in a bitmap image based on a sprite’s alpha and using a bitwise operator to draw the sprite into that bitmap image. Most graphics systems do this transparently to the user in some fashion (pardon the pun). 8-Bit Rocket has a good introduction to these concepts with regards to Flash, but read on for the important part of this post.
Read the article on Photon Storm
The article shows that Flash Player is already fairly optimized for graphical composition operations when compared to blitting. Both showed similar framerates. However, the cacheAsBitmap operation caused an exponential increase in memory consumption when the number of sprites on stage increased. Ironically, the comparison was run by the creator of the Pixel Blitz library who, I’m sure, had a difficult time presenting the results.
There are some good details in the article so if you’re interested, read the whole thing before you decide if you agree.
Have you done any work with bit blitting or sprite sheet animation? Have you found it to be beneficial? Tell us your thoguhts.
Tags: animation, bit, blit, oldschool, sprite
Posted in AS3, Programming, Tips, Tricks, and Hacks, Videogames | 1 Comment »
March 18th, 2010 by Mims H Wright
I recently created this video game for Suzuki to promote the Kizashi’s all-wheel-drive performance. I threw this together in about 2.5 weeks starting with some code I wrote for the Global Game Jam. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the work.
Give it a go and let me know what you think!
Suzuki Kizashi Vs. Evil Weather
All design was done by Siltanen & Partners
Tags: auto, car, client, driving, game, portfolio, Videogames, work
Posted in News, Videogames | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010 by Mims H Wright
Yesterday, completely unannounced, a package arrived at my doorstep containing two copies of the ActionScript 3.0 Bible Traditional Chinese Edition! Well, that’s pretty Zang if you ask me!
I’m going to keep one as a trophy but if you can read chinese and you’d like a copy, let me know and I’ll send you a present*!
*(If you’re outside the US, i’ll ask you to pay for shipping)
Tags: as3bible, book, chinese, free as in beer
Posted in AS3, In Real Life | 1 Comment »
March 16th, 2010 by Mims H Wright
I’m going to be speaking at the LA Flex User Group in Santa Monica on Wednesday, March 17, about Skinning in Flex 4. I know it’s late notice but come on down if you can make it!
Tags: degrafa, Flex, gumbo, meetup, skinning, spark, speaking, user group
Posted in Conferences and User Groups, iphone | No Comments »
March 14th, 2010 by Mims H Wright
Interfaces are amazing things. When I was young and green, I didn’t understand their purpose, but after working with them for a while, I will defend their use to the end. I try to create lots of interfaces early on in my projects and I find that by keeping things flexible, it saves more time despite the extra typing, pardon the double entendre.
But this is not an article about why interfaces are so great. No, this is an article about the mysterious gap in the Flash Player API with regards to an interface for DisplayObjects. If you have a class typed as something like IView, there’s no way to enure that IView can be a parameter of display list functions like addChild().
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: AS3, displayobject, hack, idisplayobject, interface, workaround
Posted in AS3, Architecture, Programming, Tips, Tricks, and Hacks | 5 Comments »
