Category: Central

Although Mike blogged this already, I wanted to pose a question. After Kenny showed me his creation this morning of sending a JPEG file to another Central user via Flashcom, it was interesting to note that even running local host, there was a 3 second lag in sending a 22k file.

Now, the player didn’t lock up, and the speed at which Central was displaying the image after writing it and reading back was blazingly fast. What was slow was the actual sending and the time it took from the netconnection.send to the response from the server to call the method to render the file. Now, 22k is a sizable chunk to be sending over the wire, but neither I nor he could figure the exact bottle neck.

I know this is a question for the Flashcom list, but was curious if anyone knew.

I think in the future, most would be able to lessen the damage by establishing a link, and then sending over smaller chunks of the byte array, therefore giving you the ability to show a preloader at the cost of transfer speed. Still, just curious what part of it chokes since it isn’t necessarely the player and if that part is identified, what one can do to lessen it’s latency.

Overall, the ideas here of file sharing applications via Flash and Central are definately cool prospects.

Question posed on the Central Dev list on why Central cannot be maximized to 3 monitors. I tried it myself on my dual monitor setup with no go. After some tests at both 1280×1024 & 1920×1440 on dual monitors with an ATI Radeon 9600 SE, it seems the Central App Window’s maximum width is 1920 pixels wide, but I couldn’t find a maximum height. My guess is it’s the same, 1920.

Interesting considering Flash’s max width and height for a SWF is 2880×2880. I’m not losing sleep over a loss of 960 pixels; I’m still trying to figure out what I’d ever do with even 1920×1920 pixels in the first place.

16 hour day, and I still got mad energy. I’ll probably collapse in a quivering heap Friday… at least I’ll be at the pub then hopefully collecting on answering Flash questions bartered for beer. I’m a cheap date, so maybe I can teach the bartender how to go to the frame, or explain to the waitress the pros and cons of authortime placed components vs. dyanmically attached ones.

I’m messing with Central stuff, right, and I notice that testing stuff here at home just sux. It’s so dang slow here… but at work, she screams; both my Flash stuff I’m making for my Central stuff. It’s becoming eerily similiar to computer games (non-console). A lot of games come out for the 30% percentile of computer users; yes, that figggr includes geeks. Basically, if you are in the top people of high-end systems at the time the game is released and you can buy it, it’ll run very well; you may even be able to peek all of the game settings and still have it run very well.

For the rest of us who drive our comps into the ground, and then make fish tanks or stop animations out of the remains when they finally do choke, our games have 2 lives; most are half way playable, and then later play so well, it’s a totally different game.

I feel Central’s doing the same thing. I figure by the time 3.0 is out, comps will be fast enough that you’ll probably never hear someone bitch about Central runs slow or is a resource hog on their PC… only their cell phone or something like that.

The concept works great for game makers because it allows them to up the realism and depth (in my opinion) of the game. Yeah, a game isn’t anything without a good story, hence Final Fantasy 3 (America’s 3) being the best game every made (Super Nintendo), but you gotta admit Tron 2.0 blows away the original, both in graphics and in story depth. Interestingly, the original is still fun, but I have no qualms dishing out the dough for the new version because it is just that cool.

I think same goes for Central. Like, the only thing really holding me back from making 10 million Flash applications nowadays is time, not technology nor the IDE. I notice more and more that even the animations put out would NOT have run years ago; case in point, BillyBussey.com. Try running that processor-ravager on a 400 p2. Yeah, sure…
…and yet now you can; you instead focus on the site’s experience vs. the performance getting in the way.

I see Central going the same route; I ignore any performance shortcoming when I go to work and use it. It’s amazing how quick I forget too… cause everytime I come home and open the same project, I’m like “DAMMIT!”

It also lends credence to the whole Flash ecology thing, and basing a lot of business on it; it’s only getting faster and more widespread. Pretty neat longterm planning and execution.

Longhorn’s based on that very concept. Make the shiot need the uber hardware.