How to optimize?

[Krillo webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Hi folks

I am getting near completion on a project I have worked on for some time. Now I am starting to notice that the frames per second count is not all that I have hoped. I have some pretty large animations which are composed of various bitmaps from a 3D program. I know this is bandwidth consuming but compression is pretty high and it flowed good in the Flash internal viewer. It's in a browser the performance is hit.

What I have done so far:

* Movie is divided up in scenes, where eace key animation is in separate scenes.
* Several frames have been taken out to cut down on filesize
* Average jpeg compression on animations are "20"
* Sounds are in
* framerate is set to "30"

Some of the animations are admittadly large in regards to screen area but it seemed to work fine in the internal viewer, keeping a framerate of around 25-27. This drops to 15-17 in browsers.

Question:

One thing that is very annoying is if I set one animation sequence to repeat it always plays fast the second time which makes me think that even if the animation is preloaded it is in some way cached for the second run. Can I somehow make use of this knowledge? Most animations only run once in the final movie. Would I somehow benefit in loading in the scenes as separate SWF's from the stage?

If you have any favourite links to pages about optimizations feel free to share.

thanks

Krillo

[acadian webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

I can see a few reasons why your movie is running slowly;

1. you are using scenes rather than the loadMovie action, big mistake.If your site is particularly processor intesive, as yours seems to be, using scenes will only further burden the memory and processor on any users computers beacuse the entire content of the movie must be loaded at once, especially when viewing it in a browser (remember, browsers only allocate a certain percentage of RAM to the flash player, unlike the built system player which is free to use as much RAM as it wants.)

2. jacking up the frame rate of your movie wont help much either. The frame rate at which the flash movie plays is dependant on the system resources available on the viewers computer. In other words, you can notch the frame rate up to 100 if you want but most people's computers will never play it above 15-18 fps. It's always a good idea to develope your movie at the base 12 fps.

3. bitmaps, compressing them is one thing but remember, one of the most memory/processor intensive tasks flash can perform is to tween (motion or transparancy) bitmaps. this is a sure fire way to bog down a clip. If you must motion tween a bitmap, try using actionscript instead of straight motion tweening and if you are trying to tween a transparancy shift, try masking the image with a flash vector image and tweening that instead, flash has a much easier time tweening vectors. It's also a good idea to breakapart all your bitmaps.



[url]http://bluebeatdesign.com[/url]