4k Game Contest – and a word about ternary operations in AS3

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:

[code]
if (lx == 0)
{
this.x = Math.random() * 550;
}
else
{
this.x = lx;
}

if (ly == 0)
{
this.y = Math.random() * 400;
}
else
{
this.y = ly;
}
[/code]

I replaced the above with this:

[code]
x = (lx == 0) ? x = Math.random() * 550 : x = lx;
y = (ly == 0) ? y = Math.random() * 400 : y = ly;
[/code]

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.

Posted on February 18th 2009 at 12:08 am by Rich.
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