Archive for the 'as3' Category

Page 2 of 11

Tween engine comparison

Published on Sep 8, 2008 in as3, experiments and Flash. 19 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I wrote a while ago about our tween engine at Hobnox but I did not post any performance demos.

Here are the results for 1000 DisplayObjects with manipulation on their scaleX, scaleY, alpha, x, y and rotation properties. It is also very important that you take a look at the memory behaviour. A click starts the tweening.

As you can see it makes a lot of sense to stay type-safe and to manage the memory you are using on your own.
I will talk about those concepts in my next session AudioTool’s Private Parts in Brighton and Boston. Since optimization on a code level is trivial the main performance boost is achieved by re-thinking algorithms, structures and concepts. I guess one of the most interesting topics will be the optimization of our cable solver which was running O(n^2) (really!), then O(n(n+1)/2) and could be minimized to a rare O(n(n-4)/2) worst-case.

PixelBender Runtime Compilation

Published on Sep 8, 2008 in as3, experiments and Flash. 10 Comments Tags: , , , .

Tinic posted today his PixelBender assembler and disassembler. This makes me happy, because now I can post an experiment I could not show for a while.

If you know PixelBender, than you know that you can not create loops. What you could do is unroll all constant loops with a fixed length. If you know simple convolution filters like a blur, you know that you need an xy-loop and you know it should not be possible with PixelBender at all. Let me prove you wrong and have a look at dynamic loop unrolling with PixelBender (be careful with high values!).

I built a library to assemble and disassemble PixelBender kernels at runtime. I wrapped it also in a high level API so basically you can create a new Kernel by doing var kernel: Kernel = new Kernel();. Then when you need your shader as a ByteArray you simple call kernel.compile(). There are still some glitches here and there but I hope that I can release the source code pretty soon.

Compiling dependent SWF files

Published on Sep 5, 2008 in as3, Flash and projects. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

AudioTool Ant buildLast night I spent about 9 hours writing a build script for the AudioTool allowing us to compile each plugin into its own SWF container. I think it is the first time a Flash project is taking more than 5 minutes for me to compile completly.

I figured out that it is definitly not easy to handle the mxmlc or compc in a way we needed it to be. The point is that we have for each plugin three modules A, B, C and a library D. A depends on D. B depends on A and D. C depends on A, B and D. Now to make it even more complex we have A, B, C and D in one project so that developing in this environment stays still simple. The solution to compile all modules in a way we need them to be was first generating unique entry points for the SWF files because we do not want to work with SWC libraries (or the SWF inside the SWC package). After having the unique entry points we compile D (and its dependencies as well) without including the source of A, B or C. Afterwards we can compile A. But B is dependent on A so we have to compile a SWF for A and then a SWC for A so B can link to A as an external library. C is also analog to this but needs B as a library as well. In the end it was 5am and I was happy to have the complete build working which generates a lot of SWF files and SWC libraries.

Since it is very hard to configure Ant for this (I was using XSL in the beginning for automated code generation) I started developing my own Ant tasks. I have to say that it is really simple and saved us hours of work. We have now one single XML file containing the dependencies and the Ant task will do the rest (code generation, compile tasks, etc.).

FDT supports Vector syntax now

Published on Aug 11, 2008 in as3, Flash and news. 0 Comments Tags: , .

This FDT update makes me so happy that I have to post about it. The Powerflasher FDT developers implemented the new Vector.<T> syntax. Hooray — we can make full use of the Vector class!

FDT is implementing it also in a nice way. So for instance if you have a Vector.<int> named vec and you write var sprite: Sprite = vec[0] this will result in an error because FDT knows that your Vector was typed int.

There are still some glitches here and there but I hope this will be fixed soon as well.

By the way I am using the beta site to update my FDT — so if you want to have Vector support too you should use the beta update site.

AS3C — take a look inside

Published on Aug 11, 2008 in as3, c++ and others, experiments, Flash, personal and projects. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

I have started working on AS3C at the end of last year. After a quick prototype the development stagnated and I added just several fixes and tests to the code. Basically I started AS3C as a complete C# newcommer and because of that the code is very ugly.

Due to the fact that I do not have much free time to continue developing AS3C I think it is the right time to release the source-code on the one hand and to let people experiment with it on the other hand.

You can either download the sources and build AS3C manually (you will need zlib.net) or download a binary from trunk/bin/.

When using AS3C you will need the ActionScript from the SVN. Remember that you write real ActionScript code which gets translated by AS3C. There is also one undocumented and very experimental feature existing. If you run as3c.exe -optimize main.swf you could get some speed improvements if you have heavy loops using the Math class. But it could also destroy the SWF so do not forget to make a backup :o)

ActionScript 3 Quine

Published on Aug 4, 2008 in as3 and Flash. 1 Comment Tags: , .

A quine is a programm emitting its own source-code. I guess this is the most simple variant one could produce.

Continue reading ‘ActionScript 3 Quine’

Rasselbock Recordings

Published on Jul 30, 2008 in as3, Flash, personal and projects. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Besides implementing OggVorbis I was working on an effect for a while. It is called the Rasselbock and will probably not make it into the next launch but since I love the device so much I have some top-secret recordings of what that little guy can do.

It is basically an IDM/glitch-type effect unit with a lot of cool features. It supports sequenced effects like gate, stutter, etc. and keeps them synchronized to the beat. A killer feature is that it includes also a sequenced mixing unit. This sounds maybe a little bit bizzare but once you can play with it you will probably love it.

All of these songs were made in about 5 minutes and are very cheap. Anyways it is a lot of fun to take any sort of instrument (like a metronome) and route it through the Rasselbock.

ActionScript 3 Vorbis Encoder

Published on Jul 24, 2008 in as3, experiments, Flash and news. 12 Comments Tags: , , , .

Vorbis Encoding TimesAs André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.

Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks.

Where to go from here? Of course we think the best we can do is to open-source the encoder. But there are a couple of other things in my mind. I started modifing Tamarin and added two functions to the Math class. Those convert a Number to its binary IEEE32 single-precision representation and vice versa. With those two functions we could get huge speed improvements for performance hungry tasks like this one. I hope Adobe will not forget about this as well — there seems to be general problem currently trying to support the simple Flash user on the one hand and the “Flash explorer” on the other hand.

I know you may ask what this feature could be good for, but doing floating point math using bitwise operations is a killer when it comes to performance. We are currently not allowed to do this and there is no reason for that.

Water with Pixel Bender

Published on May 20, 2008 in as3, experiments, Flash and hydra. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Another simple example here. I think it was a little bit hard for me to understand first how to do animations with Pixel Bender based on user input.

The user input is currently only a Math.random() but I think you will get the idea. I always put the output of the shader back into it and get a nice wave effect.

8bitboy on steroids

Published on May 20, 2008 in as3, experiments and Flash. 15 Comments Tags: , , .

Remember the 8bitboy? It was our first application to test how good dynamic audio works in the Flash Player. It was also the very first application we ported to test the new Flash Player 10 audio capabilities.

Here is the Astro version.

I was very happy when I ported the 8bitboy because it was very simple. You just have to replace the sound buffer we were using with the callback of the Sound object and pull for samples from the processors.