2003-03-17

... ?

...has impressed me no end...It's a wonderful little environment to try things out in, with the bonus of being able to delve into full JAVA if required... I mentioned the speed yesterday but just to elaborate further, there has been a lot of apps I've wanted to develop in Flash that were simply out of the question due to its extremely slow processing. For example, the Flash Game Of Life I developed was limited to a grid of around 15 by 15 which isn't really enough room to see the larger behavior of the system. It actually took a lot of optimization to get it to work acceptably even with those few cells, time far better spent being creative & moving forward. In P5 , there is an example GoL that despite being non-optimized works on a grid of 300x300 at 24fps or so...That's 90,000 cells compared to 225 ....(The irony that Flash is on ver 6 and P5 is still in Alpha isn't lost on me...)... I'm not putting P5 forward as replacement for Flash for general use - P5 isn't aimed there - but if you find Flash frustrating & limited then P5 is definitely something to look into... Time to dig out my O'Reilley JAVA in a Nutshell...