This needs to be faster!

programming flash
1

Ok. I’m working on a project for a museum. It’s a kiosk about a sculpture and it will be created in FlashMX2004 and run on a dual 2.3ghz, 2gb ram, 256mb vid card computer at 1280x1024 fullscreen on a planar touchscreen 19" monitor.

Anyway, everything WORKS fine, it’s just that it’s SOO slow. Even on the godly computer (which, by the way, is godly because later this is going to go in a director file, which will slow it down EVEN MORE so that it can play HD video) it’s slow. Are there any tricks or any kind of optimization we can do to keep it from running so slowly?? It’s all vectors, and it’s crazy but, since it’s obviously not the computer, Flash can’t handle it’s own vectors moving around slightly.

Here are the links for the files you’ll need:
http://www.servercorp.com/~rlseaton/digitalCatalyst.fla
http://www.servercorp.com/~rlseaton/test.fla

So could some of you take a look at this? Don’t mind the code, I’m just a beginner. The art wasn’t done by me, but by the graphic artist for this project.

At any rate, when you click on a person (except for the guy on the right, this is a work in progress) they are to light up and display who they are. When you click them again, they are to zoom in and a section about them will appear. The zooms work fine, but only because I make everything else invisible. The middle guy (bill) and the sculpture itself will zoom in, but I havn’t added a section for them yet. The lady on the left, Beverly, will zoom and if you click on the test section will go back to where she belongs. There is a squirrel and some birds in the background. All color fades are done in Actionscript, as well as the zooms. The colored parts of the sculpture change color slowly.

Anyway, this thing is supposed to run so much faster, but something is dragging it down. I mean we can take out the people and that will speed it up, but we NEED the people in their for the exhibit. We can take the squirrels and birds out, but they don’t help much.

So, does anyone have any ideas on what I could do to speed this up? It USED to be 60fps, but we slowed it to 30 and that helped a little as well :slight_smile: lol. Don’t know what we were thinking.

Thanks to anyone who replies with some help!
If you have any questions just ask. There are a lot of plans for this project so I can’t really take things out, but if there are some tricks to making things work faster, let me know!
By the way, the figures need to shuffle around slightly, and their bodies are cut up into many vectors. Is there a way we could cut down the number of vectors, and would this help speed it up? (even the squirrel has MANY parts to him). And remember, this was designed for a touchscreen, so rollovers weren’t used. Oh, and the menu on the top left is still in progress as well!

Again thanks ahead of time!!!

–xezton

2

I can’t help you, but I wanted to say that it looks great :slight_smile:

3

I think this might help to start with:

  1. Multimedia presentations designed to run on a local drive (ie, not published on the web) should be done in Director. Director is designed for beefy multimedia, Flash is designed for streamlined, low-bandwidth multimedia.
  2. 60fps is excessive, even 30 is excessive. TV is only 25fps.
  3. Alpha fades slow down the movie, The file size doesn’t get much bigger, especially with AS fades, but it slows the movie when it plays.

Specifically:

  1. You seem to have some pretty complex vector shapes, especially in the sky. You might be better off changing it to a png image, otherwise smooth the clouds so they have fewer anchor points.
  2. Have you tried a faster feeling interface? That is, don’t worry about smooth, high quality tweens, instead go for a quick and snappy feel with the people. Fewer keyframes, fewer in between frames and fewer different vector shapes (more shapes = more anchor points) will speed it up.
  3. Your little chipmunk doesn’t need much detail in it’s animation - you could probably safely simplify the shapes that make it up. Only animate the running motion once with tweens, then convert it to a movieclip. Let that movieclip run in the timeline several times before going to the stand-up-and-sniff motion.

Always try to reuse elements. No need to create another tween if you’ve already made one. If Flash plays a movieclip instance once, the next time it plays will be faster because it’s already in memory.

Hope this helps. Looks great, good luck.

4

Is Director capable of everything Flash is capable of except with the ability to handle more vectors and higher res images and video?

Is there an easy way for us to kind of “port” this to director, or would we have to make a whole new project out of it?

From what I’ve seen, Director doesn’t lend itself very well to graphic design and the complex animations that we have going on in our kiosk, all we are using it for is a shell to play the HD video that we’ll add in later.

Let me know.

–Xezton

5

bump

6

would a preloader help?

7

I thought tv was 29.97 fps Carixpig…

8

TV is different all over the world, so my appologies. I’ve always been taught that tv animation is 25fps. So 30fps is a suitable frame rate too.