Re: FLASH: FLASH : getting a bit confused !

[John Croteau]

Hi Adam and all,


> >> Am I correct in assuming that it is best, and most efficient to have

> >> as littlle as possible "tweening" in the main timeline  (be it shape

> >> or motion)?

> >No, it is often just slightly less efficient byte wise to put things in

> >MCs but it is generally better design because of the flexibility and

> >potential options.

I have to disagree.

Placing animations in Movie Clips has little effect on performance with

the 2 following conditions.


1)  Size of the file will increase about 30-40 bytes.

2)  If the Movie Clip is big it might affect the streaming because all

of the Movie Clip needs to be loaded into memory before it will be able

to start playing. In fact everything in the same layer of the same frame

needs to be loaded before anything in that frame will play.


Many designs will have no problem at all with the above conditions,

others will bog down.


> While moving animations and tweens off the stage does clean up your

> design and make editing much easier, I have found that animations nested

> in symbols require a significant amount of processor overhead.  If you

> have a very complex processor intensive movement it's best to do it on

> the main stage to help avoid bog.  Nesting a tween within a tween will

> bring a processor to it's knees  and going as far as three to four

> levels deep will drop your frame rate into the 1-2 fps range. (Unless

> you have a very powerful machine)


Nesting Movie Clips in of itself is not a major problem except as noted

above.

Again remember everything in the nested Movie Clips as well as the

original Movie Clip needs to be loaded before any of it can play.

If you have multiple actions occuring on the stage at the same time,

things are going to bog down based on how complex and how much of the

screen is involved. Whether the objects are in nested Movie Clips or

layered on the main timeline makes little difference.


I and others have many examples of things on the Web with 3 levels of

Nesting. Check out the Score where I use 4 deep nested Movie Clips.

That is graphics nested inside a Movie Clip which is nested inside a

Movie Clip, inside another Movie Clip,  which is inside a Movie Clip on

the Main stage.


The same animation plays the same when it is a simple 2 deep nested

Movie clip even on slower computers.


-----------                               -----------------------

John Croteau

croteauerols [dot] com (mailto:croteauerols [dot] com)

-------------                             -------------------------

FlashTek  (Advanced Websites with Flash) http://www.FlashTek.com/

Flash Bible (Fast track to good Flash)  http://www.FlashBible.com/

Flash Central(The Universe Starts Here) http://www.FlashCentral.com/

The Flash Tech Resource (Tech Notes)   http://www.FlashCentral.com/tech/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


------------------------------------------------------------------------

To UNSUBSCRIBE send: unsubscribe flasher in the body of an

email to

list-managershocker [dot] com

.  Problems to:

ownershocker [dot] com

N.B. Email address must be the same as the one you used to subscribe.

For info on digest mode send: info flasher to

list-managershocker [dot] com