TweenBencher, Another Flash Animation Kit Speed Performance Test By MosesSupposes
He also is calling for standards in Flash Animation kits but this is good and bad. I agree a common syntax should be used and the base components should be agreed upon and integrated into Flash, but standards need to be extremely simple and performing systems. We have seen how packaged Tween bloats and I think the Go approach mentioned below is a good direction for that. Adobe seems more open to this though talking about including SWFObject and possibly helping other kits like Papervision3D with performance enhancements.
I think that a standard is already emerging out of the AS3 toolkits leading the way Tweener, TweenLite, AS3Easing , Animation Package, Animation System, Twease and possibly Go (as Fuse had many users) which is the replacement in AS3 for Fuse that is unreleased. I think the developer market will decide that. Also, the big draws to good kits are simplicity, size, performance and maybe most important, the community and author’s willingness to get out there as technology changes. Right now Fuse is a bit behind in the last aspect, I think people are already enjoying the smaller Tweener, TweenLite kits that have simple syntax and are extremely small. Go is going the right direction in making the pieces much smaller as I agree when you have to use two kits there is extra uneeded duplication.
MosesSupposes might release a Fuse 3 still (built from Go?) but that is still in an private beta stage ( for Go- not Fuse) fairly recently and seems a bit unsure as to whether it will be released or not per the blog.
To forewarn the fanbase, this is not a release announcement, no major progress to announce at this time.
I’ve been holding my cards close since I came up with these concepts around January of this year but it’s time I layed ‘em on the table.
Fuse 3 (if built) will be a combination Physics + Tweening Engine with 2D + 3D animation & sequencing capabilities.
The idea is that all details are registered with a central class (probably FuseCentral) that monitors and prevents overlap between various handlers during runtime.
From the description of Go it seems pretty flexible and useful with making your own syntax but sometimes flexibility there creates a partitioned platform as syntaxes emerge, but it can also change with the best simple syntax. I think making it pluggable is more important than custom syntax, actually I wish animation kits all used the same syntax. Right now that is the biggest hurdle getting people to switch. Also, syntax that still works in AS2 is a bit attractive such as Tweener and TweenLite so that work in AS2 and AS3 does not hinder maintenance.
I have an idea cooking, now in private beta, called Go. I will be posting shortly with some background information on what led me to this approach, but right away let me share the concept and architecture with you.
- Go is a lightweight – around 4k – portable set of base classes for creating your own AS3 animation tools.
- Go provides an agile, purposeful architecture that is highly extensible.
- Go is not a does-it-all Kit (a la Fuse), but such a kit can be built using Go. If Fuse was a vending machine, this is more like a knife and a pan and a way to cook for yourself.
- Go does not require special syntax to use. You can instead, design your own.
- Go’s engine is efficient, capable of processing a jaw-dropping 10-20,000 individual animations on a typical system. (Disclaimer: it remains to be seen how Go will perform in a real-world setting.)
- Go is designed to encourage developers to use tweening, physics and 3D together.
- Go is inspired by the popular Cairngorm framework in its approach. That tiny set of classes does so much, truly useful without dictating your code.
At this point in the Animation Kit game for Flash, real tests matter, and performance will start to become the main focal point as well as simplicity from released and completed packages that have strong communities and user bases. I think the kits that have succeeded well and created platforms have been the most simple and compact (the evolution is this way) that can be used as base kits in other larger systems. Starting with simple core systems that perform is good systems design to help minimize complexity as long as the pieces together aren’t too complex to use for general coders in Actionscript. Looking forward to watching this space progress.
