Ben Garney

"PS I look forward to seeing your blog post!" - Ben Garney

"PS I look forward to seeing your blog post!" - Ben Garney

"PS I look forward to seeing your blog post!" - Ben Garney

"Hmm, I am not sure 90% is true. I do agree that in the end it's about what will get your project done to spec fastest and the display list can be a powerful ally in that battle. My quick rundown on your points: I don't use Flash IDE and none of our artists do, there is no workflow benefit. In fact having our own art pipeline and processing steps is a big benefit for download size and performance. Nesting is a waste of time IMHO. It just complicates rendering, updating, and hit detection. You can transform bitmaps just fine. (Although if you need to do high quality free rotate/zoom then vector is the way to go!) The timeline is a way for artists to break your game by introducing frame scripts, weird frame behaviors, high-overhead morphs/tweens, and so on. In the cases where I do use SWFs for animation/download reasons, I render them out to bitmap spritesheets first (either at runtime or before hand) so I have a fixed overhead render. Filters are best rendered to bitmaps. Filesize is..." - Ben Garney

"Hmm, I am not sure 90% is true. I do agree that in the end it's about what will get your project done to spec fastest and the display list can be a powerful ally in that battle. My quick rundown on your points: I don't use Flash IDE and none of our artists do, there is no workflow benefit. In fact having our own art pipeline and processing steps is a big benefit for download size and performance. Nesting is a waste of time IMHO. It just complicates rendering, updating, and hit detection. You can transform bitmaps just fine. (Although if you need to do high quality free rotate/zoom then vector is the way to go!) The timeline is a way for artists to break your game by introducing frame scripts, weird frame behaviors, high-overhead morphs/tweens, and so on. In the cases where I do use SWFs for animation/download reasons, I render them out to bitmap spritesheets first (either at runtime or before hand) so I have a fixed overhead render. Filters are best rendered to bitmaps. Filesize is..." - Ben Garney

"Hmm, I am not sure 90% is true. I do agree that in the end it's about what will get your project done to spec fastest and the display list can be a powerful ally in that battle. My quick rundown on your points: I don't use Flash IDE and none of our artists do, there is no workflow benefit. In fact having our own art pipeline and processing steps is a big benefit for download size and performance. Nesting is a waste of time IMHO. It just complicates rendering, updating, and hit detection. You can transform bitmaps just fine. (Although if you need to do high quality free rotate/zoom then vector is the way to go!) The timeline is a way for artists to break your game by introducing frame scripts, weird frame behaviors, high-overhead morphs/tweens, and so on. In the cases where I do use SWFs for animation/download reasons, I render them out to bitmap spritesheets first (either at runtime or before hand) so I have a fixed overhead render. Filters are best rendered to bitmaps. Filesize is..." - Ben Garney

"The Social City footprint is primarily art. There are a lot of frames of animation and they take up space. :) People have gigs of RAM, when you are doing a game (not an ad) why not use it? Even my phone has enough RAM to run Social City. (Maybe not enough CPU, bandwidth, and screenspace, though. :) ) I agree that for some situations the display list is great. It is definitely preferable for building a UI. For mousing in a game, you often want custom behavior anyway so the mouse behavior built in tends to be a liability instead of a benefit. Probably the biggest trade off is development complexity. You might also get lucky and be doing something that maps well to the display list, in which case, go nuts!" - Ben Garney