Overview
Everything I have ever learned about programming came from playing video games. Growing up as a kid I had no idea that my passion for playing and wanting to build video games would have such a far reaching influence on my career as a developer. This talks goes through my history of playing games and how I learned to take techniques such as Blitting, Sprites and advanced optimization, and apply them to some of the most high profile websites I have built. Blitting is a technique that allows you to rapidly draw bitmaps to a screen. This is one of the oldest techniques for displaying graphics on a screen and was used heavily in the 8bit and 16bit video game days. Even though this is an old technique it doesn’t mean Blitting still doesn’t apply to modern Flash development. Bitmap manipulation is incredibly fast in Flash and can be used to scroll large images, make games, or perform generative art. By harnessing the power of the Bitmap and BitmapData classes in the Flash Player you can achieve incredible run time compositing.
In this talk we will discuss how to take advantage of blitting in desktop, web, and mobile Flash apps. By looking at real world examples of blitting such as the Hype framework, Flixel and The Johnny Cash Project you will get a better understanding of how to take advantage of Blitting in your own project. I will also cover how each of these examples can be ported over to mobile. All code in this talk will be available as open source for people to use, explore, and learn from. Blitting is a powerful tool that every Flash developer should have a basic understanding of since it can apply to so many different situations and platforms.
