Edit: Thanks to Kevin Luck for pointing out a flaw with the code in my original post (there was an extra assignment taking place, which caused the byte count to increase). Remove that and ternary will match if/else on a bytes-used basis. I'll keep this post up here regardless, just ignore everything from this point on

Disinformation follows:

While working on my 4k Game Competition entry tonight, I found out something that may be useful for others entering:

ternary operations in AS3 will often result in a larger final SWF size.

Here is a set of if/else conditionals taken from the game I'm working on:

I replaced the above with this:

Much more compact, 15 lines less code, does exactly the same thing as the unrolled version above it - yet it uses 20 more bytes in the final SWF. Blindly use ternary operations around your whole 4k game and suddenly you could be wasting a large amount of bytes when you think you're saving them (because you're entering less code).

There are a few other little tricks I've found while coding this game, and they pretty much all lead back to the same rule: for a smaller SWF size, unroll everything. When 4096 bytes is all you have to play with, this can make all the difference.

Tags: 4k game competition, optimisation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under Code, Experiments, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.