Blurb.
Age 34, Male
Procrastinator
Glasgow University
Glasgow, UK
Joined on 6/12/04
Man, i love the fact that my favorite RPG's creator can't stop creating content and improve what he has.
You are great animator. Phyrnna is great musician. Literally everyone who help you make stuff deserve attention.
Also i can't believe that some short final fantasy parody animations grew into great game that i play most of my time.
Love yo shit bro keep it up
can't wait for this to come out. it's gonna be free? or paid?
Dam you've been a machine with the work these last years.
@matt-likes-swords Ah I see so it's basically doing the things that developers would've been expected to do manually (rasterizing vectors) just more aggressively in the past I guess? I remember cacheAsBitmap being suggested as a performance improvement in the past for mobile devices as well, just didn't do much at the time and it definitely didn't work at all for animated movieclips. Haven't used newer versions of AIR in quite a while but it's good to see that HARMAN is still supporting it.
Speaking of which, I remember skimming through their release notes a while ago and I'm pretty sure I saw a lot of new APIs that were introduced (e.g. in the Point, ByteArray and other classes IIRC). My development environment is primarily targeting desktop devices and FlashDevelop doesn't play nice with newer versions of AIR since it's obsolete at this point -- but have you / are you considering making use of them?
cacheAsBitmap is very useful for graphics that are not animated - but all of the characters and stuff are vectors. The animated stuff is never rasterised. Maybe there exists some convenient/efficient way to rasterize animated stuff, but I didn't figure it out, and I'm not sure it would make a huge improvement based on some tests I tired. (unless using something like Starling)
Not sure which AIR features are considered "new" at this point, but HARMAN did make some changes to Desktop AIR that I liked, such as bringing back the Stage Quality options - a bit too late for me though! FlashDevelop is definitely feeling a bit outdated and has been less reliable, but I'm still using it for now.
I hop back on newgrounds for the first time in 8 years to learn that not only are there 5 epic battle fantasies, but there are mobile ports?! Frick, that's awesome!
@matt-likes-swords The only way that I know of is to draw all the frames into one big BitmapData and then use that as a spritesheet, and that probably would result in big gains only if it's a replacement over movieclips with lots of filters and complex layouts.
As for the changes that HARMAN have made, I found this link that shows them all - nothing too spectacular it seems, which I guess is fair since they're probably running on a skeleton crew for maintenance purposes -
This is gonna be amazing ?
Matt your newgrounds pm? Your message?
With EBF5 on mobile with EBF4 sometime later, is it safe to assume that one day EBF3 will also get a mobile port someday?
Very low priority because it's a free game and no one will pay for it.
Gimmick
Vector graphics works great on mobile devices? I'm shocked! Is that with the newer versions of AIR? Is it because AIR performance has improved or because mobile phones have gotten way faster than they used to be?
matt-likes-swords
Not sure, but mobile AIR does a lot of stuff on GPU that the desktop version does on CPU.
Probably depends on the type of game, but EBF5 runs well enough on everything other than very cheap Android devices. The biggest issue turned out to be stutters from the garbage collection, rather than the vector graphics. There are some limitations though - filters don't work, and you have to make good use of cacheAsBitmap on your backgrounds.