Flash MX 2004 Games : Art to ActionScript

Flash MX 2004 Games
Pay particular attention to the font section. Here there are two fonts mentioned; ‘_sans’ uses just
15 bytes. This is because the small text area at the bottom of the game is a static font that is set to
be a device font by checking the box in the Properties panel.
Figure 13.6 Using device fonts
See what happens if this box is not checked.
Font Name Bytes Characters
----------------------- -------- -----------
Arial 2125 GLRUacdeghiklmnoprstuwx
Arial Narrow 1087 .0123456789OPST
This includes every font outline needed to display the line ‘Get more help using static text with
linked URL’. Rather than this using just 15 bytes it uses 2125 bytes, over 100 times the size, just
because one simple check box was overlooked. Notice also that the font outlines included for the
Arial Narrow font contain the numbers and ‘OPST’, just the outlines needed to display ‘STOP’
along with the number text boxes. When you are trying to keep the game small, device fonts
make a huge difference to the file size.
Pong, one of our favourites
Before we look at how to code the game let’s look at how the use of fonts can influence the size.
You can see from the Movie Report for Pong that the game uses just 5854 bytes or around 5 K. But
look where the bytes come from: 4688 of the 5854 come from the numbers in the ‘JellybabyITC’
font. If you are really strapped for bandwidth you could use a device font here. As you know,
device fonts use just 15 bytes so the total size would come down from 5854 to just 1166. See what
impact fonts can make on the file size of a small game. If we had chosen to embed the entire font
instead of just the numbers, then the game would have used 42 131 bytes, nearly 40 K more than
we could have used for a device font. My recommendation for these small loader games is to use
device fonts unless you really cannot.
pong.swf Movie Report
----------------------
Frame # Frame Bytes Total Bytes Scene
------- ----------- ----------- ----------------
1 5854 5854 Scene 1 (AS 2.0 Classes Export ..
192