This is one of those high level rules that applies across a wide range of topics. It has application in everything from how you approach your user-interface, to your attitudes towards options screens and even as far reaching as API design. The basic premise is that developers often hide their inability to make the smart [...]

The built in MovieClip class is slow and bloated. For most high performance situations in a dynamic real time game, it is not going to going to perform well enough if we have lots of intense animations. Today’s article is going to try and establish a specification for an Animation library that uses BitmapDatas for [...]

BitmapDatas are a necessary part of a high performance game engine. Sometimes we can get away with haphazard BitmapData management, but more often than not, we need to be aware of where and how we are instantiating BitmapDatas so we can keep track of them and free up memory as appropriate. We also want to [...]

There are a thousand important things to optimize in a game engine, but perhaps the most important optimization we can make is the renderer. The reality is that even though we have a bunch of fun new tools available to help squeeze a few more frames out of the Flash Player, it still sucks in [...]

It turns out the preloader code in The Last Preloader You’ll Ever Need was not without its flaws. Today’s article presents an updated preloader that eliminates the added Flex framework fluff in the original preloader, and provides a helper class, SimulatedPreloader, that makes it super easy to test your preloader code.