I have some special effects for my movie that i am creating in flash mx. except the problem is that it lags. Why the hell does Flash MX Have to lag?? I mean, if the frames are loaded, why would it have to lag? And then if i put it to medium, or low quality, the special effects are crappy. What am i supposed to do? I don’t want to buy a new souped up computer for making flash movies.
Try bumping up the frame rates, it might make things smoother and faster, but don’t over do it. A frame rate between 20-30 would be preferable in my opinion. =)
Flash is slow. Its not really slow, but its not fast. Therefore I say slow. Flash does not make use of more than one processor nor is it in anyway hardware accellerated (your GeForce FX wont help you here). What you are left with is a little chugging math cruncher which does its best to try to calculate all that is needed to draw stuff on the screen. Also bear in mind that, as a browser pluggin, the total filesize of the pluggin itself needs to remain small. This in turn means sacrafices for speed were made in order to keep that size from escalating to something beyond reasoable-56K-download-time-size. What does this mean? Flash is slow. What do you do? Make sacrafices yourself.
Chances are there are some decent threads laying around here going over in detail what can be done to reduce lag. I can spit some off the top of my head.
-
reduce geometry. Each curve and line you have in every shape is more math for Flash to crunch when it needs to draw the screen. The less you have, the less Flash thinks and the faster things go. This also includes outlines as a seperate entity to fills. Getting rid of outlines (if possible) will help your animations speed up. Optimaze helps.
-
alter _quality. Youve laready done this and said it looks crappy, but in some cases it can be a savior (ie every pixel based animation should be low quality - it will greatly improve performance)
-
consolodate code. I doubt much code is involved (from what I can tell) but bulky code can slow things down.
-
size DOES matter. The bigger your flash presentation, the more screen space Flash needs to draw for and the more it has to think. The smaller the screen, the faster your animations will go.
-
avoid transparency where possible. If not needed, dont use it. Calculating overlaying translucent colors is harder than calculating straight solids.
-
less text. Text is pretty complicated geometry. If you have a lot of unnecessary text, lose it. Either that or rasterize it…
-
bitmaps can be faster than vectors. Vectors are typically smaller in size, but, and this can depend on the image, a bitmap image can move across the screen (with greater detail) then a vector image.
… thats all I can think of off hand. Some people concede that tweens slow things down, but Ive never seen that personally. Shape tweens (which I never use) might be what they mean there as that usually causes some nasty geometry
hope this helps
