Performance Issue with flip down tiles

[Ian Thomas-5]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a project that produces a display of flip down tiles that counts down to a specific date (for an event countdown) and I've pretty much got the animation nailed.

However, I'm finding it hard to get the performance up to a high enough framerate for it to work smoothly.  I'm fairly new to papervision3d and have tried some things (cacheAsBitmap for my movieclips, baking textures, setting moviematerial.animated to false where possible etc.) but now I'm really stumped!

I've attached my source code and a link to the working demo can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/anatomicdesign/flip-tile to show the text, click outside the tiles and it should animate in.

Currently, the way that this works is to produce two sprite's with text boxes that can be updated (though actually I can't seem to get the textformat to update to show a different color!).  These are used as the material for four planes which are positioned to make a tile and are the DisplayTile class.  A row holds several DisplayTiles (default  34).  A message can be written onto a row (upto the character length) and one of the rows has been extended to produce the countdown effect.

I'm stumped as to how to improve the performance of this, so any help will be gratefully received!!

Many thanks,

Ian

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[andysk8er]

Hey,
The best way to fix your performance is to make some guesses about what is slowing it down and then try removing those elements one at a time to see what effect it has on the frame rate. Then, try to figure out how to optimize each piece and add it back in.

In your case, I would think that all of that dynamic textfield handling is probably hogging your performance. So, I would completely remove all of the textfield rendering and just flip blank tiles to see how my performance improves. If it improves dramatically, then I would figure out how to rework the text to render more efficiently. If it makes almost no difference, then, I would look elsewhere for performance improvements.

Sometimes it's one big thing that makes the difference. Other times, it lots of little things.
Good luck!

Ian Thomas-5 wrote:

Hi everyone,
I'm working on a project that produces a display of flip down tiles that
counts down to a specific date (for an event countdown) and I've pretty much
got the animation nailed.

However, I'm finding it hard to get the performance up to a high enough
framerate for it to work smoothly.  I'm fairly new to papervision3d and have
tried some things (cacheAsBitmap for my movieclips, baking textures, setting
moviematerial.animated to false where possible etc.) but now I'm really
stumped!

I've attached my source code and a link to the working demo can be found
here: http://sites.google.com/site/anatomicdesign/flip-tile to show the
text, click outside the tiles and it should animate in.

Currently, the way that this works is to produce two sprite's with text
boxes that can be updated (though actually I can't seem to get the
textformat to update to show a different color!).  These are used as the
material for four planes which are positioned to make a tile and are the
DisplayTile class.  A row holds several DisplayTiles (default  34).  A
message can be written onto a row (upto the character length) and one of the
rows has been extended to produce the countdown effect.

I'm stumped as to how to improve the performance of this, so any help will
be gratefully received!!

Many thanks,

Ian

 
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[Ian Thomas-5]

Thanks Andy,

I think I've just about sorted this now, it was a combination of things really (like you said).

First thing was to stop using MovieMaterial and to use BitmapMaterial with bitmaps created from the tile movieclip.

Then it clicked that I could use just one MovieClip per row to create the bitmaps, reducing the number of MovieClips from 100+ to just 6.  The bitmap stuff hogged a bit of memory, but according to DeMonsterDebugger I've got the fps averaging at 28 now (which is much better).

you can see a preview on http://office.coolpink.net/ian/innovator10 (the site is in the middle of chop at the moment so a lot of it isn't styled/working properly)

I'm pretty chuffed with how this has turned out, though it's one of those projects that doesn't inspire awe in the viewer because it seems so simple!  Needless to say it's been a bit of a learning curve for me with < 6 months flash/actionscript experience!!

Cheers for the help!

Ian

2009/7/7 andysk8er <elbarto37@...>

Hey,
The best way to fix your performance is to make some guesses about what is
slowing it down and then try removing those elements one at a time to see
what effect it has on the frame rate. Then, try to figure out how to
optimize each piece and add it back in.

In your case, I would think that all of that dynamic textfield handling is
probably hogging your performance. So, I would completely remove all of the
textfield rendering and just flip blank tiles to see how my performance
improves. If it improves dramatically, then I would figure out how to rework
the text to render more efficiently. If it makes almost no difference, then,
I would look elsewhere for performance improvements.

Sometimes it's one big thing that makes the difference. Other times, it lots
of little things.
Good luck!

Ian Thomas-5 wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
> I'm working on a project that produces a display of flip down tiles that
> counts down to a specific date (for an event countdown) and I've pretty
> much
> got the animation nailed.
>
> However, I'm finding it hard to get the performance up to a high enough
> framerate for it to work smoothly.  I'm fairly new to papervision3d and
> have
> tried some things (cacheAsBitmap for my movieclips, baking textures,
> setting
> moviematerial.animated to false where possible etc.) but now I'm really
> stumped!
>
> I've attached my source code and a link to the working demo can be found
> here: http://sites.google.com/site/anatomicdesign/flip-tile to show the
> text, click outside the tiles and it should animate in.
>
> Currently, the way that this works is to produce two sprite's with text
> boxes that can be updated (though actually I can't seem to get the
> textformat to update to show a different color!).  These are used as the
> material for four planes which are positioned to make a tile and are the
> DisplayTile class.  A row holds several DisplayTiles (default  34).  A
> message can be written onto a row (upto the character length) and one of
> the
> rows has been extended to produce the countdown effect.
>
> I'm stumped as to how to improve the performance of this, so any help will
> be gratefully received!!
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Ian
>
>

> _______________________________________________
> Papervision3D mailing list
> Papervision3D@...
> http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/papervision3d_osflash.org
>
>

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