[casual_games] Wrapper Speeds

[Hal Barwood]

Hello:

I'm developing in Flash (8), I'm a reasonably enlightened coder, and 
performance of my projector app and swf-in-browser is just fine at 15fps 
and 800x600 dots on both fast XP systems, slow (500MHz) 98SE machines, 
and various Macs.  However, when I tried wrapping with Northcode's 
latest Flash-Player-8-capable SWF Studio, speed dropped to approximately 
60% of native.  Ouch, that's a huge hit.  So here's a question:  does 
anyone out there have some info on Flash wrappers, which ones are best 
(for whatever reasons), and which ones are simply the fastest, etc.?

Hal

Andy Makely wrote:
> I work with Flash every day, so I though I'd add some info to the mix.
> 
> - As mentioned here previously, Flash handles bitmap images just fine.  
> Especially PNGs, which retain all of their transparency information.  
> You can even write code to animate using your existing sprite graphics.
> 
> - Flash can achieve an acceptable frame rate if coded efficiently, 
> especially if you are working with a 640x480 screen.  It does get harder 
> to get good redraw speed from an 800x600 Flash canvas, especially if you 
> have a large number of animated sprites.  Recent changes have been made 
> to the Flash rendering code so that single-frame bitmap assets draw MUCH 
> faster than before.  Scrolling backgrounds, for example, are no longer a 
> real performance concern.
> 
> - Flash 8 (the most recent version) does not support MIDI playback of 
> any kind.  You can convert your MIDI files to MP3, at the expense of 
> your file size.  You might also be able to build a custom C++ wrapper 
> that encloses your Flash movie, and perhaps get MIDI playback working 
> via the C++ libraries, but it's probably not worth the effort.
> 
> - You can get Joystick support via commercial Flash projector tools such 
> as mdm's Zinc.  Flash does support all keyboard and mouse input.
> 
> 
> I definite understand the concern for not wanting to rebuild the game 
> again.  Flash may not be an option in this case, but many folks have 
> found that it is a viable casual game platform.
> 
> --
> Andy Makely
> 
> 
> On 2/8/06, *Jeff Helfand* <jeff at nevadainteractive.com 
> <mailto:jeff at nevadainteractive.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Also, we had considered Flash, however, for two
>     reasons, it just didn't make sense.
> 
>     1. All of our sprites and backgrounds were created in
>     Photoshop.  Recreating them as vector graphics given
>     our time frame and resources is not an option.
> 
>     2. The new version of the game has two new worlds and
>     nine different power ups.  The pace when reaching
>     those levels is much faster.  According to benchmarks
>     I have read, Flash will have performance issues.  It
>     is also mouse driven.  I could be wrong, but can't
>     risk it due to development time constraints.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> andy makely
> 
> 
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