Loan Shark – fast object pooling
A couple of years ago, I created an AS3 object pooling utility for a games project I was building. Since then, I’ve used it quite a few times, in order to speed up apps and improve resource management,...
View ArticleObject pooling utility updated
Having just got back from an awesome break in Thailand and Taiwan, I just updated my object pooling utility. Thanks to Ostra Ceruzka for raising an issue with its strict mode functionality with me –...
View ArticleCODING WRONGS – Where do I start with the bad?
It gets scary out there sometimes. During my freelance career I’ve worked at a lot of different companies and have seen such coding horrors as you cannot imagine. So I thought I’d start immortalising...
View ArticleConnected TV development with AIR for TV
Having just finished building the UI for the YouView set top box, I thought I’d share some of my insights into best practices when building applications for such resource constrained devices. The...
View ArticleSneaky tricks for developing on small devices – Bitmap ‘folding’
One of the most problematic constraints when developing applications for mobile or Set Top Box is video memory (AKA VRAM). You often will not have control over how much video memory is allocated to...
View ArticleBoosting Unity performance on mobile devices
Mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful. However, not all your users will have high-end mobile devices, so you should keep a low-powered device handy for testing the performance of your...
View ArticleOptimal scrolling for 2D games or UIs
I recently stumbled upon an old bit of code which demonstrates a technique I created for an efficient scrolling data grid for the YouView TV platform. I call it ‘Blit Scrolling’. Below is a demo of the...
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