BrokenBlog

I’m not sure everybody fully understands how fast Actionscript 3 is. Even saying things like “tenfold” are laughable. For one thing, I can’t tell how fast it is because the current game I’m toying with cannot be measured. All the code for an each frame (which is a lot) is run in less than a millisecond nearly 100% of the time. Compare that to 6 to 9 milliseconds from older games.

Let’s face it though, numbers don’t do this kind of thing justice. But this animation does (via gBlog). It’s the live 3D rendering of a several ships, with well over 8000 polygons. The speed seems to vary unpredictably, but usually sticks to around 13fps or 30fps on my computer. Compare that to the as2 example, which runs at 3fps while rendering less than 1000 polygons. It’s not just faster, it’s a different level entirely. The demo is not perfect, but the 3D quality roughly matches the original Playstation.

On a side note, I noticed the files (meshes) that the example uses are text files. If they used FZip they could’ve turned around 333KB of files into a single 55KB file, making it easier to put online rather than offering it as a download. Just a thought.