Here is what I am being so anal about… our project has a symbol that is 82 Bytes (in the output report). An this symbol is used on everypage and I want it to be as small as possible because it is used so often. (but wait there’s more…)
The 82 Bytes is just for the symbol BUT when it is acutally used an _alpha of 15% is used to change its look and feel. Alphas use up processing and I just don’t want to be that generous.
Is there a calculation that might help me determine how much the symbol bytes are increased with the alpha setting?
the entire purpose of symbols is so you don’t have to make a huge movie. i dont think having multiple instances of your symbol will increase your final movie size notably
and as for the alpha, any algorithm that could be derived from processor clock cycles used due to symbol property changes would have to be obtained from macromedia, and i somehow doubt they would be willing to give that out.
here is your solution
unless your final movie will be running on a commodore 64 i really wouldn’t worry about it. unless there’s an ungodly amount of detail that you need to have in this symbol you can also take it’s size down by changing it’s compression format (i.e. png, jpg, bmp, gif … whatever) and by changing it’s quality. use photoshop or a program like it and see what you can do to bring the size down. the alpha change will use processor speed, but unless you have 300 of em spinning around i really wouldn’t worry about it.
there is a need for anal retentiveness b/c so much crap and poor coding gets on the net. so keep up the attention to detail but there is a point when it’s excessive and i think worrying about clock cycle usage by an algorithm over which you have little to no control is that point.
Symbols- A symbol needs to download only once to the users cookies. On a site you could use it a million times and it will only need to download once. The first time. If the user doesn’t clear there cookies the page will load pdq every time afterwards.
Anyting not a symbol will have to dowload each time a page is loaded.
If you put the a forementioned symbol in a flah file by itself you could test it using show streaming and custom set the debug rate to see what it will be like for a 56k modem or broadband. Use a stop watch to time it. Now add the alpha and test again showing streaming and retime using the stop watch.
