The audience for this article is the target market of Apple Media Tool.
In other words, the people in it are non-programmers. But I hope that for
more experienced AMT developers this paper can be useful too since I tried
to give a list of all the optimization techniques around. Some of these
tips can give your application a big boost and some only give a minor benefit.
Please experiment with them before you make a major decision. Some of these
optimization tips can influence how you design your interface, but don't
let them hinder your creativity. Just use the tips as a general guide.
I also tried to give first time multimedia developers an overview of tools
and articles which can be useful in creating a multimedia title.
Why this article?
Most of the time people think that AMT is slow and that is why some of
them are choosing to use Director. Director, however, is targeted at developers
who have some knowledge of programming. Also, to get a very speedy title
in Director, you have to do a lot of scripting. I must admit that with
a standard Director package you can build a faster title, but this will
change in the near future, especially if you implement all the speed tips
we discuss here in this article. But don't see AMT as an authoring tool
with problems since most of these tips are also useful for other authoring
packages as well, even Director.
Why me?
This is the way I made my living a couple of months ago; I visited some
local multimedia developers, examined their titles, and then gave them
a list of optimization techniques. Also as the developer of AMT Accelerator
we (SKY4 STUDIOS) spend a lot of time investigating the speed of AMT. Today
I'm busy with our upcoming QuickTime based shoot'm up game, so in my rare
spare time I wrote this article. I will now change to the "we"
form rather than use "I" because I hope other AMT developers
can come up with suggestions, too. So credit will go to those people as
well. In fact other developers have written some of these tips already,
so I put their names in the credits and contributions section. I also believe
that most experienced multimedia developers can come up with a list of
tips similar to mine, so I think it is more logical to use the "we"
form from now on.
We assume you are using Apple Media Tool 2.0; for those who are not, please
do the upgrade, because AMT 2.0 is faster and uses far less memory.
These optimizations fall into different categories:
memory
load speed
drawing speed
We also try to give each of the optimization tips a rating. Rating optimization
is very dangerous, because many of these tips depend on what sort of title
you are building and what your priorities are. For example a game needs
fast drawing, whereas somebody who is building a catalog needs an interface
that doesn't take to much memory so it can use the rest of the memory for
storing search indices, etc. So the rating has always been seen in which
category the optimization falls. In those cases where you're unsure if
some of these tips are useful please experiment.
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Only consider it in special occasions |
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Very important |
Other symbols
When you need the AMT PE.
Possible in AMT but AMT PE is recommended.
Warning Technical explanation.