One of the worst problem that any developer have to face is the performance of his applications. There are many factor contributing to a bad performance, one of them is graphic rendering.
Depending of what you’re doing, there’s a single line of code that solves this problem.
stage.quality = StageQuality.LOW
When you set the stage quality as low, you tell flash to render all vectors without anti-alias. This increases the application performance a lot. However this can makes your application looks like a crap depending of how you built it. There is a few things you can do to balance performance and visual quality.
The first thing you can do is set your text alias as ADVANCED or if it’s a static text Anti-alias for readability.
Another tip is use bitmaps instead of vectors. Of course you must choose wisely whose graphics need to have a good quality and the size of them. Also, you can change you image quality at the properties panel to get a smaller file. Although you need to be carefull with this, because your bitmaps wont smooth if you rotate or scale them.
I didn’t research why exactly bitmaps don’t mess up when the stage quality is set to low, but I think it is because flash don’t need to calculate what color every pixel when they are displayed, all colors are already defined by the bitmap data.
With this thought, I created a high quality container class, called HQContainer, that renders all children at the quality you want (low, medium, high, best).
I have a 1000 boxes rotating. 990 of them are blue and have .05 of opacity. 10 of them are red and have a MouseEvent listener added.
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