Question

I have a flash application purely written in ActionScript 3.0.

On load, I create all UI that will be used during the application lifetime. UI creation takes about 7 seconds. I want to speed it up.

The reason I don’t create UI on demand is because I want to have a very responsive UI.

What are the best practice approaches to handle UI creation in flash applications like games?

Answer 1

One way to approach this is to only create what needs to be seen directly on the first screen on load, and then gradually load the rest of the UI. This will buy you an extra couple of seconds while the user has to navigate through the screens.

As an example, for a game:

Create start screen – 3 seconds
Create level select screen – 2 seconds
Create high score screen and option screen – 2 seconds

This way the UI is created in order of what is most likely to be accessed first (users are generally not going to click on high scores or options as the first thing they do, so we can afford to push off UI creation for a bit) and takes advantage of the fact that usually there is a slight delay while the user navigates, giving us extra time to create the UI.

So, figure out what parts of the UI need to be created as soon as the game loads, and what parts you can afford to push off for a couple of seconds, and you should be able to achieve the appearance of faster UI creation (even though it will really take the same amount of time).