I am working on a cross-platform mobile game for Android and iOS devices. I am using Adobe Flash with AIR and AS3 to code the game. I am drawing my character, obstacles, and backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator. The canvas in Flash is set to 960×640. The character was intended to be 1/3 of the screen height so around 213 pixels high. I designed the character in Adobe Illustrator to be somewhere around 900 pixels high. When I imported the character into Flash I animated him, instantiated him using var player:Player = new Player(), and scaled him down to size using the scaleX and scaleY properties. I tested it out on the desktop and Android phone and it looked wonderful. However, when I tested it out on an iPhone, the player was unacceptably pixelated around the edges. I figured the fact that I drew the animation much larger than the intended height must be the problem, so I redrew the player to exactly 213 pixels high and retested on the iPhone without any improvement in the quality of the animation. I also tried converting the MovieClip to a Bitmap vector explained here but that also had no effect on the quality of the animation.
At this point, I am at a loss. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to avoid this pixelation issue that I am experiencing when going from Adobe Illustrator to Flash to the iPhone?
For a more optimised iPhone route you might want to consider creating your animation as a set of bitmap graphics, i.e. create them as png files using PhotoShop at the size you want them to be displayed at.
By doing this you’ll save CPU activity in having Flash create smoothed bitmaps