Flash MX 2004 Games : Art to ActionScript

Chapter 6: Creating artwork for mobile devices
the content to the target resolution. Figure 6.3 shows a highly detailed image. The image uses
4836 curves for the background and 452 curves for the helicopter and stunt man.
Figure 6.3 Developing a PocketPC game
The project was developed as a simple demonstration; you can open it as ‘Examples/
Chapter06/detail01.fla’. Some simple ActionScript sends the helicopter across the screen and back.
As it does this it updates the fps (frames per second) display every 10 screen updates. The movie
should run at 20 fps. When transferred to a 200 MHz PocketPC it dropped to just 2 fps as the
helicopter reached the middle of the screen. At this point Flash has to redraw all the anti-aliased
lines for the background behind the helicopter and the helicopter itself. So what can we do to
improve the frame rate? ‘Examples/Chapter06/detail02.fla’ shows exactly the same scene. This
time both the background image and the helicopter are bitmap images. This time on the same
machine the frame rate stayed up at 8 fps. If we also set the quality to medium, then the frame
rate maintained 12 fps. On the small screen with a reduced colour depth there is little discernible
difference between the two except for frame rate. Creating the bitmap images is very simple:
1 Create the content in Flash as you would normally.
2 Use ‘File/Export/Export Image...’.
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