Canvas has a significant impact on performance if you allow the flex
framework to do measuring and layout and style management. It is not
ideal for generative art work that needs to have a high level of
performance.
You can do it but you just need to override a whole bunch of methods
to avoid measuring, layout and style changes.
There are also a few flex-like components for Flash that will provide
some measure of layout capability for you (minimal comps is but one
example).
- jon
On Jun 10, 2010, at 8:30 PM, Gerry Beauregard wrote:
Hi Jim,
I see no reason why Flex can't be used for interactive artwork. The
Canvas component in Flex is derived from Sprite, so anything that
you would do in a Sprite can be done in a Canvas.
We've been using FlexBuilder 3 for development of everything at www.sonoport.com
. (I haven't upgraded to Flash Builder 4 yet). While we don't do
generative visual art, some of what we do is pretty CPU-intensive,
e.g. our time-stretcher/pitch-shifting (http://labs.sonoport.com/audiostretch/
).
We build a lot of the core audio processing stuff that's common
across many of projects as SWCs ("Flex Library Project") in
FlexBuilder. We then use use those SWCs either in "Flex Projects"
or "ActionScript Projects". Either way, we get a SWF, and the
performance of all the audio stuff is the same.
In our case, the choice of whether to use the "Flex Project" or
"ActionScript Project" option is mainly dependent on whether we want
to use all the controls that Flex provides, along with the
convenience of the "Design" mode that makes it super-easy to specify
the layout of those controls.
There is a bit of extra size overhead if you go with Flex. A new
"Flex Project" with no additional controls results in a 176KB swf
(when you export a release build) , whereas an "ActionScript
Project" is just 4KB.
Cheers,
-Gerry
The overhead
On 2010-06-11 , at 03:46 , Jim Andrews wrote:
I'm a bit confused as to how to proceed with Flash. I've been using
Director for the last 11 years.
You can see the sort of (Director Shockwave) apps I like to create
at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/sw/sw.htm and http://vispo.com/jig/arteroids/exe
. These apps contain menus, spin controls, drop-down menus, and
similar types of controls, and generally lots of them. But they
also contain, in the case of http://vispo.com/dbcinema/sw/sw.htm ,
high-performance generative art. They're both very 'interactive
interface' oriented and also very high-performance-art-oriented.
Windowing, menuing, dialog boxes, and interactive controls are
important to them. But so is lots of room for the art.
I don't really care about filesize being bulked up by Flex. High
speed access is common, these days. But if Flex is slow in
performance, that's the more important thing, to me. Is it? How is
it in terms of speed?
How would you approach making the above sorts of apps in Flash?
Would you create them as ActionScript projects or would you use Flex?
ja
http://vispo.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jer Brand" <thejhe...@gmail.com>
To: "Flash Coders List" <flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Flashcoders] Flex generative art???
Flex is for RIA's and helps you with layouts and common controls
and doesn't
really provide anything useful for generating art with either
vectors or
drawing to a sprite. With the framework itself bulking up the size
of your
swf and consuming additional resources, it's not really a good
thing.
The generative art I typically use straight ActionScript with a
library of
choice -- Hype (http://www.hypeframework.org/) being particularly
awesome
for that kinda thing.
There's nothing stopping you from using Flex / Flash Builder as
your editor
though. Just create an "ActionScript" or "Flash Professional"
project.
If you're just looking for ActionScript generative art, I'm fairly
partial
to http://levitated.net/
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