Flash Player Performance page 2

Blitting is definitely a great way to get some performance boosts at times, but it must be used with discretion (and done properly) as in some cases you actually lose performance compared to MovieClip usage. Each situation must be tested.

I’ve been messing with using 2 bitmap objects and using copyPixels to copy from one bitmap to the other which is actually displayed, and I haven’t been able to tell if it’s any faster yet. If it’s a matter of doing it correctly, I wonder if you are familiar with some examples that are good/bad, arcadeCoder?

Bump? Hello?

cacheAsBitmap is not a “miracle” method to save processing power.

When you enable cacheAsBitmap, it takes the object and processes it, saves it as bitmapData, and this means it can move it faster. (instead of calculating vectors every frame).

However, this all goes out the window when you
scale
rotate
animate
apply filters

especially over many frames. Everytime something is changed, it is forced to re process the data. And not only that, now you will have to reprocess it AND save it as a bitmap. That’s quite a performance hit since they’re doing twice the amount over each frame.

So make sure you’re using it in the right situations.

As for a blitting engine, here is one for AS2
http://www.jessewarden.com/archives/2005/11/blitting_double.html

and his sequel for AS3
http://www.jessewarden.com/archives/2006/01/diesel_battlefi.html

edit: I can’t make a list :S

Can you use AS 3.0 already? If so how?

That first link is interesting, though it’s part 1 of 3, doesn’t say any actual instructions, and I can’t find the other parts of the series. Do you have another link that is the blitting engine, or the other parts of the article?