Trig performance test

I have asserted that trigonometry is slow in a number of posts. The whole point of a post on Trig-free rotation blending is that trigonometry is so slow that it should be avoided. My reasons for this are my experiences on previous platforms, where trigonometric functions are often tens or hundreds of times slower than arithmetic operations.



But such assumptions often prove false on new platforms. Flash in particular does not have the highly optimised arithmetic operations of modern CPUs, so rather than trigonometry being especially slow it could be that maths in Flash is slow enough that there's no need to avoid Flash. This is certainly worth knowing, as there's no point avoiding particular functions if they are as fast as other ways of doing the same thing.

New screenshot

A lot more circles in this one, and more colours, or at least it's making much more use of them. The game's not fundamentally different to last time, it's mostly a lot of subtle changes.

Update: another screenshot, below the fold, after another small change

More on Flex

Just a short update, but it's on an important point as I discovered something to make my life a whole lot easier.

Screenshots

New screenshots; three of them this time so they're below the fold

Shader vs. ActionScript

It was pointed out to me that the shader I used as an example last week did something that could be done with ActionScript, in particular a ColorMatrixFilter. This was something I was aware of, as I described how to use a ColorMatrixFilter in exactly that way a month ago in this post. But it's interesting to compare them to see the difference.