Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Back in my Applied Messaging/Convoq days, one of the things we wrestled with was how much CPU the Flash Plugin consumed when the application was doing nothing. That was AS2 and the redraw of mc elements, etc. would consume a lot as we had contact nodes that contained many nested movieclip elements, etc. Even when cacheAsBitmap was used, we had problems. Now that we have Sprites, it would have been a lot better.

Now that we can set the fps of a Flash application, has anyone used this in regards to VM ramping? For instance, when doing nothing, set the fps to 1. Just before looping through an object or animation, etc. ramp the fps back up to 31 or so... so that when you application NEEDS to be fast it is, and when its waiting user-input or socket data, its as resting as much as possible? I haven't seen any posts about using this often-requested feature. Now that we have it, who is using it? I am planning on playing with this. It will take a bunch of extra work on our part (developers), but I think its the responsible thing to do (if it works and is indeed beneficial).

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