Flash performance, vector vs bitmap

First off, I updated the "dancing duck" from days before. If you wanna see this stuff without musical accompaniment, click the duck and he'll cease his endless hula.

Now then, I've been experimenting a bit with bitmaps versus vectors for Flash stuff, just to see how things perform. I actually found something surprising. Despite what people say about Flash being a vector-optimized kind of tool, it does pretty well with bitmaps.

First off, I converted my bitmap duck to vector using VectorEye, as it's the only thing I've found that'll convert a bitmap object into vectors without creating an ugly approximation that's full of holes. It can make a large image, but it does make a good approximation of the bitmap.

Anyway, here's a test I put together. I converted my duck to a single-frame vector image, then wrote a bit of code that scales (between 0% and 200% of original size) and rotates him dynamically. His performance is pretty respectible despite being around a thousand curves, and the file's small at 7921 bytes. . .


Not bad. You can see some banding when he's zoomed in, but I haven't yet found a bitmap/vector convertor that'll do gradients, so that's the price you pay. Anyway, here's the same movie with a bitmap ducky being dynamically scaled and rotated. It's 4,322 bytes and it's actually slightly faster than the vector one (but only very slightly. On my machine I had to let it run for a few minutes before it got ahead of the vector duck).



In other words, even though Flash is put forth as a vector kind of animal, it seems to do well with bitmaps. I presume I could get better performance by optimizing my vector duck. I could probably shrink the size pretty significantly by converting his body to a single closed polygon with a black-to-yellow gradient rather than a buncha little slices, but that's not something I can do manually given that I've got hundreds of frames.

Until then, I guess I'm not gonna be so zealous about making everything into a vector. Bitmaps ain't necessarily a problem.

Yeah it was cool

The new Battlestar Galactica, that is. It had a lot going over the old series. . .

1. The Cylons actually had a motivation. They weren't just some Star-Wars-Stormtrooper knockoffs who were battling us simply because they were evil. You learn not only why they wanna wipe out humanity, but how.

2. The Cylons were actually scary. Back when I was the prime age for this stuff (around 1979) we had discussions as to which characters were more incapable of actually shooting a person, the Cylons or the Imperial Stormtroopers.

3. The new Commander Adama. Lorne Greene had a pedigree and all, but he never did much but stand on the bridge and give orders. Edward James Olmos, on the other hand, beat a Cylon to death WITH A FLASHLIGHT! He definitely lends some Kirk-like badassitude to the role.

4. It appears to contain actual science regarding how a spacecraft would move. Somebody actually figured out that there's no air in space.

5. People actually die.

6. No chimpanzee in a robot dog costume.

It's not perfect. The "guy who constantly sees visions of the Cylon chick who tricked him" bit got old really fast, but it was definitely a cut above the old series. With the old Battlestar Galactica, you always had the sense that you were watching the boring middle part of a bigger story. Why the ships were trying to find Earth was never explained, and you were never sure if they'd ever actually complete their mission (ala Star Trek's "five year mission"). That "Galactica 1980" where they suddenly found Earth definitely smelled of a last-gasp effort to revive the series after it was cancelled.

I just wonder if they're gonna add any more of the "Journey of the Mormons" mythos to the story like in the original. The original Battlestar Galactica admittedly took most of its story from the Journey of the original Mormons to the Promised Land of Utah. I didn't see as much in the new one, except for the occasional exclamation of "Praise Kobol". I could be wrong, but "Kobol" sounded a lot like "Kolob", which is where God lives according to LDS folks.

I guess we'll see. I always rather liked the Mormon parallels in the old Galactica story. It added something interesting to a dull series that desperately needed something interesting to happen.

It's official. I'm weird.

Here's a quick preview of what I'm working on. . .



Yes, it's an animated 3D rubber duck doing a hula dance to the tune of "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay".

Funny thing is, it actually makes sense in my game.

. . .and yes I know it's compiled for the Flash 7 player. It's time you updated your player anyway, so quit complaining.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

And by that I mean it's the time of year when Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro start duking it out for low price king in the "it's almost photoshop" battle. I've seen Elements going for $40 after rebates for a while, but the following is the best I've seen so far.

Best Buy has PSP Power Suite for $99 with free shipping (search for item number 6055001). On the page you'll see two rebates, one for $40 and one for $30. One rebate allows a copy of the UPC, so you can send in both. That drops the final price to $29 with free shipping. Pretty good, given that it comes with PSP 8, Photo Album 4, Animation Shop, and a pile of free "frames" and "picture tubes" (little graphical thingies that you can use to make your pictures look hideous). Photo Album 4 looks pretty cool, as it can turn a pile of digital photos into a CD slideshow that you can play on a DVD player, complete with musical accompaniment. Might have to get this rebate just so I can get that.

PSP prices have dropped on eBay, though. Last year you could routinely see copies selling for $70, but PSP 8 seems to be quite plentiful and doesn't appear to be fetching more than $40.

FWIW, PSP 8 is quite nice. It's basically the same feature-set as PSP 7, but is much better organized. It appears that they went nuts adding new stuff to PSP 7 and didn't bother to give the new features any kind of coherent organization so you could find any of it. PSP 8's got some new stuff, like Python scripting, but except for the "fix this picture automatically" wizard, I can't think of any of it I use.

I guess we'll see if Elements returns fire and we end up with some cross-rebate deals that allow you to grab some good free product.

Oh, and there's a PSP 8.1 update at JASC. If you register, you'll get a CD with the new version, but there's also a downloadable version. I recommend the update, as it fixes a buncha little annoyances.