AIR vs. Unity3D. Who’s faster? (Update 1)

Update 1: uploaded some sources (look at the end of article).

Hey there!
Yeah, it’s been a while blahblahblah.. To the point! =)

Sometimes I’ll highlight actual files from the archive, attached at the page bottom.

Sometimes I see Flash developers interested in the Unity3D lately, and I – one of them actually)
I work with Unity for a while already and all I can say – it’s fantastic experience! So cool to learn C# language (I hope other Flash devs make wise decision to code in C# as well), to learn new community and people, to meet a lot of new challenges and to look at 3D world from a new point at all!

Many Flash developers are still uncertain they should try Unity and spend their time learning this brand new world though.. And in some cases it’s built on top of the AIR and Unity3D performance differences obscurity. So I’ll unveil portion of this differences in this article to help those Flash developers make a choice (whatever what they choose)!

All examples I’ll compile with AIR 3.6 and Unity3D 4.1 and I’ll try to keep similar functionality and look of these examples to let them compete.
I’ll test builds on the pretty slow Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and make some tests on the desktop as well.

Intro

Okay, let’s start from comparing empty builds.
To measure FPS in unity3D I’ll use hand-made FPSmeter working with GUIText.
In AIR builds I’ll use different FPSmeters, usually in-built to the frameworks I’ll use.
Well, let’s see to the built apks (I built Captive Runtime in AIR and usual release build in Unity3D):
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BETA ActionScript 3.0 Reference review

Hi! This is a current list of the properties, methods, constants, etc. from the beta reference requiring Flash Player 11 or AIR 3.0:
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FlashDevelop as3 syntax coloring scheme

Hi, this is a syntax coloring scheme I use in my daily work in the FlashDevelop IDE:

It greatly saves my eyes all day, hope you’ll like it too.
Its based on one another coloring scheme, but I don’t remember it’s author unfortunately 🙁
Download

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Inverting animation in the Alternativa3D

Hi! If you wish to reverse (play from the end to the beginning) some of your animations in the Alternativa3D engine, you could try to set the AnimationClip‘s property speed to the negative value, but it could be harmful in most cases and don’t officially supported.

Unfortunately, there is no any information or suggests about inverting animations like so on the public yet and nothing about it in the official documentation. I think, current engine build (7.7) have no lightweight native implementation of this functionality. It could be nice to see something like boolean reverse property at the AnimationClip class, isn’t it? Bot there is nothing similar yet =(

So, with great tip from the Vladimir Babushkin (about rebuilding animation by keyframes with reversed time), I came to this piece of code:
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New in the Flash Player 11 (Incubator) API

Hi! For sure, you already heard about FP11 Incubator build. And maybe watched and played some molehill-related demos already. And even you could write something three-dimensional with help of new playerglobal.swc. But new Flash Player version brings not just the low-level GPU API, but also many other nice functionality. I’d like to share all the Flash Player 11/12 related information, found in the prerelease Language Reference (~7MB) for the Incubator build.

Here it is: Continue reading

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