I’m close to finishing a new project. Well, it’s actually not that new of a project, but it hasn’t gone online so far, and when I did the first version back in March I’ve used Papervision to achieve the goals. It’s basically a simple CoverFlow effect to scroll through Logos.

The thing with the old Papervision version was.. it got pretty slow when loading many pictures (resulting in many 3d objects). I got briefed with a screen design more or less and expected much less elements to be loaded. Now they got back to me saying they had some problems. Oh yes, they had. Boy was it slow!!

So I did a new version, skipping Papervision for the new Flash Player 10 capabilities. Wow! What an improvement not only in speed, but also in quality (because I wouldn’t have to switch to crispy bitmap handling for acceptable speed – and Flash doesn’t provide that feature anyway) and file size (less than 25%!). Now I just hope that the end client will have the nuts to go with Flash Player 10 :-) (Adobe still doesn’t provide any statistics, but it’s not that wide spread yet as for now).

See here the result (still in development – click the picture). You’ll need Flash Player 10 (I don’t check for the version in this example):

I made use of SimpleZSorter

Update: Well, the client wouldn’t go with 10. So I had to recode the Papervision version to speed it up as much as possible, and I think it got pretty speedy after all. See here for comparison.

I like to keep all my projects on a svn server. So far this was just for myself and I didn’t care much about the simplicity of checking out and in – a little chaos is acceptable if you’re up to handle it ;)

Finally I was forced to rethink this strategy because I wanted to let other people work on a project. As many actionscript projects, this one also heavily relies on external libraries, most of them hosted by Google Code, another one being my own (closed) lib. So should I tell people: «hey, just svn checkout from here and there and then relink the libs in the project properties but don’t check in the updated settings for christ’s sake!»No. Too shaky, really.

Fortunately, SVN provides a fucking cool way to solve this issue: svn:externals. (more…)