Michel Wacker On Game Design and Development with Flash

Flash to iOS Performance Tests

Last week, I sat down to do some intense Flash to iOS Performance tests to get an impression what the best approaches for porting Save the Maidens to iOS would be. Besides testing out a couple of tweaks that were supposed to improve iOS performance, I wanted first hand proof whether pure blitting actually was the holy performance grail it is proclaimed to be, when it comes to porting animations.

As described below, I've come up with another approach in this years spring which works with bitmaps as well but instead of copying pixels around, simply slices up the initial sprite sheet containing all animation states and assigns the sliced bitmapDatas to bitmaps on stage.
I needed proof whether this was worth anything compared to blitting, since plenty of developers including some on the Adobe front promote blitting techniques as the one true solution for an acceptable mobile performance.