Ozone Asylum :: December 2007 :: Holiday special

The theme was open to anything "holiday-ish". So, particles and sprites being tempting, I decided to try some trickery based on most recent versions of our favorite browsers. PNG transparency for one. Flash as sprites also, instead of images, based on the "Flash Satay" way to integrate Flash movies using standards compliant markup.
Hereafter, the "swish" Flash source, the .swf Flash result, and the png image used in the various iterations of this snippet - download and use at will.

While I was writing this, Wrayal expressed ideas that are implied in the development of this lil' thing : using an "animation canvas", through css clipping, to rotate the sprite against x/y axis at a low processing cost - and to zoom it, why not?

Plus other ideas of his own.

The previous snippet version was 0.7 - the rotation canvas was now part of the snippet. BUT... Zooming is not a very complex task for browsers. However, in this version, the png image for the rotation canvas is some 130KBs, so making 32 more, for various zooming sizes, would be a trade off in all possible ways : loss of speed in animation (eventhough most of the canvas is clipped and doesn't involve pixel redraw during animation - ??! Don't ask me why), and loss of download speed. It's a no-no.

Final version for today, as I won't publish a new one before midnight ,) - version 0.8.
20 lines of active code. 96 rotating, zooming, moving, alpha blended sprites in 16M colors. And performances that are now ok by my standards.
...But there still is something to do.

Swish source for flash animation