Drawing a pie chart

This is something I wrote for the game I'm working on but removed a few days ago as I went in a different direction in the design. As the code is fairly self-contained I thought it might be of interest.

Another screenshot

This is a screenshot of my latest code with the Shader in effect. It's a bit of a cheat actually as I had to slow it down 10x so I could take a screenshot. Which is a way of saying a static screenshot doesn't really give an idea of how it looks in action, at 60fps with everything moving.

 Also the game now uses no art assets: everything is procedurally generated. I don't rule out using art in the final game but for now it's quicker and easier to work in code where I change a few numbers to completely change the look and feel of things.

Flash isn't slow

Flash has a reputation for being slow, but one I think that is largely undeserved. It is not as fast as native code but is not that far behind, and compares favourably with other interpreted cross-platform environments.


But why does it have a reputation for poor performance? I think there are a number of reasons, all of which are pitfalls developers can fall into when making Flash games. Avoid these and it becomes much easier to make games which perform well across a wide range of platforms. So what are these pitfalls?

Shaders

I tried writing a shader today (Monday). Shaders have been part of Flash for a while, but as far as I know hardly any games use them. This is a shame as they can do things that are impossible in ActionScript, often with very little programming.

Half-angle formulae

The half-angle formulae are formulae from trigonometry with a variety of uses. One important use is for optimising trigonometric calculations, of the sort often used in 2D geometry. In particular calculations of the form


fSin = Math.sin(fAngle);
fCos = Math.cos(fAngle);


can be done more efficiently.