blitMask - halts everything while generating [HELP]

[Applauz]

So after a few weeks of troubleshooting I have finally narrowed down my problem of every animation, etc coming to a halt for a few seconds is due to the capturing of the bitmap when setting up the blitMask.

 

My blitMask is quite large... .. is there anything you can offer or suggest to help with the capturing to make it more lightweight ? or am I screwed and have to deal with my whole app freeing for 3 seconds ?

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

Cheers!

 

Jonathon

[GreenSock]

It sounds like you're demanding a lot of Flash and unfortunately I'm not aware of a way to make it less CPU-intensive to capture all those pixels. I wish there was a way, believe me. It's a trade off - a single up-front processing delay for much faster processing during the scrolling animations. Typically it is much more preferable to have one delay up front if it means all the scrolling thereafter is much more responsive and smooth, but maybe in your case that's not true.

[Applauz]

I wouldn't have a problem with it if it was just "once". But its a section that loads in... when you close that section it removed the movie clip ... so when you go back to that section again .. it has to capture it all over again.

 

I don't get why it halts every single thing though during that process. I have a simple spinning preloader and the animation appears frozen during the capture.

[GreenSock]

Like most applications, Flash isn't multithreaded. So if the CPU is bogged down doing a particular task, it doesn't take a break to accomplish other tasks until it's done with that one.

[Applauz]

Would I see any benefits in using the v12 Beta ?

[GreenSock]

Nope, not really - BlitMask is the same and there's really nothing you can do to accelerate the BitmapData.draw() that must occur to capture all those pixels inside Flash. (at least not that I know of).