Hey all. Whilst I patiently await divine Flash inspiration, I’ve decided to revisit the ye olde AS3 particle engine. I’ve now been working with AS3 consistently for just over a month, so my understanding of it and it’s beauty has advanced somewhat.
Back in the AS2 days (oh how I’m glad they’re behind me… touch wood) my general architecture methodology revolved around managing MovieClip depths. With AS3 and the Display List paradigm, things have changed dramatically and coding life is pretty sweet; we get to think more about the problem/implementation and less about the tools.
The following demo and source show a more refined approach than the previous attempts will hopefully give you a good indication of what Flash can handle across different browsers.
In the demo below, you can see how many particles are currently on the stage and you can also change how many are created per frame along with how many are created when a particle hits the ground.
Click here to download the source for the above experiment. Note: You’ll need Flash CS3 to be able to recompile it and if you do, make sure you update the AS3 classpath.
Have a play around with the applet above and note the performance difference when you toggle the alpha effect on and off.
When I run it locally, my machine can comfortably handle approx 1000 - 1500 particles at any one time… though the browser, it’s more like 300 - 600 depending on which one. Still quite cool when you consider AS2 would choke at 100ish.
