flash problems

[mowgli]

I'm getting some strange behaviour in Resolume when playing flash files.
I have two very similar versions of a flash animation (as2) that self replicates a movieclip (a splash of paint). The splashes come on and when played in the flash player they remain on the stage while more splashes slowly build up.
One of the animations does just this when played in Resolume yet the other displays a strange behaviour making some old splashes disappear and randomly flicker about. The strange thing is that both animations are practically the same the difference being that the one not behaving as it should is slightly more intricate with more randomness. The swfs are not set to pass any variables to Resolume and are completely self contained.

Any clues?

[mowgli]

I'm messing with it and it turns out that the one that was "behaving" sometimes doesn't work at all, only after re-triggering it a few times it starts working again.
I was planning to use Flash for my latest project but I'm concerned about this randomness. What are people's general experiences using Flash within Resolume?

[mowgli]

I don't know how useful this is but I've been able to replicate Resolume's handling of the culprit swf from within the Flash player. To do this I deleted a "stop();" from the first actions frame after declaring the functions that control the animation.
How can Resolume be ignoring the stop??

[mowgli]

I've resolved some of the issues by making the whole thing a single frame all driven by functions controlling a movieclip. Still performance is sluggish to say the least. Any pointers on optimising performance in Flash?

[mowgli]

Ok, I've optimised the actionscript (I had a mix of as versions going on!) and I've simplified the vectors in the movieclip. This has made a big difference. The problem now is when I link parameters from the swf to resolume.
For example if I link a function trigger to BPM, things slow down again and the slider in Resolume moves in a jerky manner. I guess that this is caused by Flash constantly listening to the slider changes, is there a way to resolve this so that only trigger values are sent?
My flash is set to trigger a function when it receives >0.95 from the slider. I tried with =1 but sometimes it is missed although with >0.95 sometimes it triggers more than once.

Any help welcome.

I'm having a great public solo discussion

[mowgli]

I forgot to ask, is there a way to make the sliders in resolume display the actual values that they are manipulating rather than between 1 and 0?

[edwin]

Hi mowgli,

I don't know how useful this is but I've been able to replicate Resolume's handling of the culprit swf from within the Flash player. To do this I deleted a "stop();" from the first actions frame after declaring the functions that control the animation.
How can Resolume be ignoring the stop??

Resolume controls the Flash timeline by stepping through the frames, as a result scripts in frames that manipulate the position are ignored. Set the timeline mode of the clip that has the flash animation to autonomous to let it run on it's own.

I've resolved some of the issues by making the whole thing a single frame all driven by functions controlling a movieclip. Still performance is sluggish to say the least. Any pointers on optimising performance in Flash?

Flash is slow, it performs best on a Windows machine. You can change the render quality but that often results in jaggy edges. You should look around on the net to see how to speed up your flash animations, in general pre rendered stuff works best. Maybe using more bitmaps than vectors if possible.

For example if I link a function trigger to BPM, things slow down again and the slider in Resolume moves in a jerky manner. I guess that this is caused by Flash constantly listening to the slider changes, is there a way to resolve this so that only trigger values are sent?
My flash is set to trigger a function when it receives >0.95 from the slider. I tried with =1 but sometimes it is missed although with >0.95 sometimes it triggers more than once.

The way Flash can communicate with the host is through an xml scheme, it used to work differently, but this is actually quite slow and meant to set some values once in a while instead of trying to update the values in realtime like you would like to do. I'm afraid we can't do much about this.
Try using a timer in combination with your value check, so don't trigger before N ms have elapsed.

I forgot to ask, is there a way to make the sliders in resolume display the actual values that they are manipulating rather than between 1 and 0?

No, if you need it for debugging you could show your values in a textfield in your animation.

[mowgli]

Thanks for that. I guess that the answer is pretty much to not use Flash!
It's a shame though. The reason I want to use Flash is because I'm making generative content for an ultrawide installation with three projectors and I was hoping to be able to scale the swf's with no loss of quality so they have to be vector based. Would performance be better if everything was actionscript generated rather than having movie clips with vectors?

Have you seen my other post: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9681
any clues about that? I've tried using "stage._width" to no avail.