Recommendation for Flame Object

[Dines]

It'd be cool if a future version of the Flame Object could clip itself so that its bounding box was only the size required, whilst maintaining the streaming effect you get when you move a flaming object.

It could simply check its coordinates in comparison to the rest of the layer it's on and expand/retract its border depending on what it needs. This would save having one big canvas, whilst still enabling it to leave trails when the source object moves.

So for example, my character moves to the right. So the left-hand side of the flame object stays where it is, and the right-hand side moves with my player. The hotspot adjusts to follow my player. The canvas has now become larger, allowing for the fire trails due to movement.

The object knows that the particles with their current settings will vanish after about 80px, so once the character has moved far enough, it clips the left-hand border 80px from the hotspot.

Make sense?

[Brandon]

I tried making a screensaver with the flame object, and just making it 1280 by 768 made the application run at 5 fps even without events. Will hardware acceleration make a difference for this?

[James]

When the object is rewritten for hardware acceleration, yeah

[Brandon]

Sorry Jam, I don't know much about hardware acceleration besides it uses built-in hardware on the computer to speed up apps instead of being completely software based. But that is good news, because right now I can't use it for anything at a size above 320 by 240 because that is about when you start to see some slowdowns.

[Jeff]

Yes you would only want to use it in small locations until HWA comes along and it can be faster.

[Brovic]

The Flame Object uses 100% CPU even for a basic flame so it has to be optimized in some way besides HWA. The wonderfull exemple of stuckboy (Flame exemple) uses 0% cpu while done with MMF. It would be nice if Kisguri could reuse that engine for its object.

[Novabrain]

If you are setting a single object on fire, a good approach for speed is to set the size of the Flame Object so that your flame is properly visible on all sides.

Then, have the flame object follow your object by setting the hotspots and coordinates so that your flame is always over your object.