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So my environment is all set up and now I'm working on the movement physics of my character. I used blitting to copy over my tiles from a tilesheet. But since they are static, they are only copied over once. And with the Hero (main player character), I figured that I might blit him into his continuously changing position. But now, I'm not quite sure it's necessary?

Is there a real big perfomance-save to copy the Hero sprite into a new position constantly using Blitting, OR, is it fine to just copy it into the game once, and simply move the Hero sprite as a movieclip?

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Can you give us some more information? Is your original art vector? How many objects are going to be drawn at once? The more specific you are, the more specific I can make my answer. –  AttackingHobo Jun 9 '11 at 18:51

2 Answers 2

If you are moving 1 simple object around, blitting will not give you any performance increase.

But if you want tons of complex objects, particles and enemies, you should probably use blitting for everything.

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Thanks for clearing that up. What if I wanted particles for visual effects, could I still JUST Blit those and still leave my User-controlled character still be moved around as a MovieClip? I guess what I'm asking is if it's normal to combine the blit method with simply moving Movieclips? –  Kid Jun 9 '11 at 23:45
@Kid, you should probably blit the player to a bitmapdata, and then have a bitmap that uses that bitmapdata, and apply rotations, scaling, position and all transformations to that. –  AttackingHobo Jun 10 '11 at 0:54
Sorry for the delay, been away. Ok so I think that is what I am doing. Look, first I copy (with copyPixels) the Hero-sprite from a Tilesheet that I have imported into the Library. Then I addChild(Hero) and move that child around. That Hero variable is of :Bitmap data type. Does this sound about right? –  Kid Jun 12 '11 at 23:29
Yeah that sounds right. Draw everything to the bitmapdata of the hero bitmap, and just move and transform the bitmap however you need to. –  AttackingHobo Jun 12 '11 at 23:39

A MovieClip still needs to be rendered by the Flash Player. If it's a animated vector shape, it will take longer than blitting a bitmap. But as AttackingHobo said, you might not see the difference with only one sprite.

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