[thelist] flash popups: are they processor dependent?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Mon Apr 30 17:11:39 CDT 2001


For "Why does the Remedi Project offer two pieces for different CPU
speeds?" then I don't know the full "because" myself,sorry, but I notice
that their alpha-blended draggable windows are animated in the high-CPU
version. That's expensive. There may be additional processor-intensive
design choices in the richer version of that piece.

(Background: Some things can be limited by transfer speed, such as overall
size of assets or number of simultaneous loads, but other tasks are
rendering tasks and can be directly affected by both CPU power and
contention for the processor from other applications... complex curves cost
more in SWF rendering, as do larger screen areas, bitmap resizing, realtime
alpha blending, audio decompression, even background streaming.)


Joe Crawford wrote, in part:
> Designers usually have fast machines. Flash designers also. There
> has always been a danger in Flash authoring of making movies
> which run great on the authoring machine, but like a dog on
> anything just a tad slower.

Absolutely agree, thanks for bringing it up... it's important to get the
client to commit to their minimum viewing machines, and then test during
development on a variety of machines in this low-end range. That way the
feedback comes incrementally during development, rather than all bunched up
at the end.

jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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