Hi everybody,

here’s some progress report.

Rendering

I’ve been trying to optimize the whole rendering process. Some of the “thinking” behind it is quite old, from the days of AS1, so I thought It was well worth the effort of revisiting it.

I have managed to reduce the amount of layers and blendmodes needed to achieve the lighting. Also, there are less transform matrixes involved.

However, the performance increase ( at least in my preliminary tests ) is not as big as I expected. After all these years there are some things about the flash render engine that still elude me. But it will go faster, around 15% , so It is an improvement after all.

About walking

I have fixed several collision and pathfinding related bugs. I receive lots of questions about pathfinding and collisions, mostly about “making a character walk properly from point A to point B”. Making a character walk around is a complex thing ( even in GTA IV characters get stuck all the time ). The engine provides a way of calculating a path between two coordinates and collision events, but there’s a lot of extra work needed to get a decent walk.

My poncho demo provides a quick and dirty effort in this matter, but with different cell size, character size and speed it will need to be adjusted. I provide it as an example of how to approach the issue, but I don’t consider the walk algorythm a part of the FFilmation engine. I’d like to point that the engine will never provide a walkTo() method because it can’t be effectively solved in a generic way.

This is something that belongs to every application, not to a graphic engine.

Release

I expect to release and update by the end of the month.

Bye !

Looking forward to the next release.

Keepin an eye out for any new revisions on google code