[swfmill] Anyone using swfmill?

[Anders N. Schultz]

Hi Daniel

I was attempting to use swfmill for my business.

We use Flash for our customer front end display. We have done some fairly
sophisticated solutions with dynamically creating Flash user interfaces on
the client as an essential part.

Recently, we encountered a problem when having to show hundreds of
full-screen sized images (for a real esate client) loaded dynamically into
Flash. After consuming more than 1 GB of memory the images (imported jpgs)
suddenly turn red. It seems that this is happening as soon as Windows moves
a huge chunk of physical memory into virtual memory. We tested this over and
over and to ensure that the images themselves was not the problem.

To solve the red image problem I tried out swfmill. Many of the images are
displayed in various sizes. Therfore, I saw a big potential in the ability
of creating an .swf file on the fly using this as a library and showing the
images with AttachMovie insted of LoadMovie. Also, I liked the idea of being
able to use .png's without converting them.

I did a successfull pilot and found that using swfmill, I would be able to
decrease the memory needed for the program to run by 50%.

However, when I started building huge swf files with swfmill my project
failed. It seems that swfmill has a problem when it is asked to make an .swf
file based on an xml file having a large quantity of big images. I used the
same format for my xml file as described on the swfmill pages on the net.
And for my pilot project it worked out very well.

An odd thing was that swf files generated would vary in file size - even
though no changes was made in the xml file. Sometimes the size would be a
couple of megabytes, sometimes less and sometimes more. Very puzzling for me
since the .xml file stayed the same.

I tried to troubleshoot by taking out some of the images. I manged to get a
proper .swf file with only two images in the xml file. After that I tried to
increase the number of images in the xml file in order to find out if there
was a limit. I don't remeber the last successfull image count (10 - 20
images, I guess) but the alarming thing was that when I then decreased the
number of images I could not get a successfull .swf file anymore. I ended up
with the same two images in the xml file as at the outset but was not able
to get a proper .swf file anymore.

Maybe I did not use swfmill properly. Naturally, I can't claim to be an
expert on the product. I ended up thinking, however, that swfmill has some
sort of stability issues ...

I don't know what you can make out of my experience .. but at least you know
that I tried the product.

Keep up the great work. Swfmill has great potentials.

Best regards,

Anders


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "daniel fischer" <dan at f3c.com>
To: <swfmill at osflash.org>
Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 8:48 PM
Subject: [swfmill] Anyone using swfmill?


>
> hi all,
>
> while the stream of bugreports seems more or less constant, i hardly hear
of any project that successfully uses swfmill. It would be nice to know if
swfmill actually works for anything but trivial examples. So i'm asking you:
>
> Do you successfully use swfmill in your project? If yes, would you mind to
describe the project in a few words, what it is about, how big it is,
roughly how it uses swfmill, etc; and would you mind me mentioning the
project as a reference on the swfmill page?
>
> Obviously the more exotic the use of swfmill the more interesting it is,
but i'd also like to find the biggest-in-terms-of-number-of-assets project
around ;)
>
> Of course also, you are always happily invited to comment on the current
and future swfmill in any respect.
>
> -dan
>
>
> -- 
> http://0xDF.com/
> http://iterative.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> swfmill mailing list
> swfmill at osflash.org
> http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/swfmill_osflash.org