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DaveGallant
Inspiring
December 12, 2012
Question

AIR 3.5 images flickering on Kindle Fire

  • December 12, 2012
  • 14 replies
  • 3113 views

We are writing a game for the android platform.

During the course of the game, as more and more memory is used up, more characters and sprites are added to the screen, suddenly many of the sprites on the screen start to flicker. It only does this on the kindle fire, and not on our other android devices.

Granted, memory usage is a little on the high side, but when researchign this I came across this:

http://mac.softpedia.com/progChangelog/Adobe-AIR-Changelog-24145.html

Adobe AIR 3.4.0.2410 Beta 2:

· AIR app exhibits severe flickering on Kindle Fire(3290739)

Now, no where after this does it mention that this has been fixed.... I am currently using 3.5.0.840

I tested the beta Air 3.6 but the game would crash immediately on start up on the devices.

Does anyone know anything about the flickering on the kindle and what causes it and what I can do to fix it?

Cheers

Dave

This topic has been closed for replies.

14 replies

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 12, 2012

You're on SoftPedia. Here's a list of all the release notes version to version:

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/air/releasenotes.html

In the official 3.4 release notes ( http://helpx.adobe.com/en/flash-player/release-note/fp_114_air_34_release_notes.html ) there is no mention of this being a "Known Issue". It's also not listed in Fixes.

You can go back to version 3.3, 3.2, etc and try to locate it but I checked from beta 3.6 all the way back to version 3.0/FP11.0 and searched the page for "Kindle" and nothing was found.

Also the wording doesn't suggest "what" exactly is flickering. You're saying your display list is exhibiting the issue but that line item suggests the entire app itself might flicker so I don't think they're related. Besides, I'd only stick with Adobe's official notes.

I checked the bugbase too and couldn't find anything in 3.4 or 3.5 about "Kindle". 3.3 did list an issue with stageHeight being reported improperly on OS 2.3 ( https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3315186 ), but that has nothing to do with it.

The reason I mention is if it doesn't exist in the bugbase and isn't in release notes, you should add this bug to the bugbase:

https://bugbase.adobe.com

It really helps to create a brand new test project that reproduces the issue each time. If you're saying you're adding a ton of display objects and that's all it takes then make a single complex symbol in the library and instantiate it a ton of times. If the number of items is the problem as you suggest (eating up RAM) then the issue will be reproducable. Then include that reproducable test project in your bug report so it will get tested quicker.

Otherwise if you can't reproduce it, it's probably actually an issue somewhere in your own code.

D
DaveGallantAuthor
Inspiring
December 12, 2012

The thing is that the flickering only happens on the kindle fire, and not on any other devices.

What is flickering are the bitmaps that are contained in several of the sprites. It's almost as if the bitmap sprite sheets for the images are being dropped out of memory for a moment, causing images to disappear and then reappear. But it only happens whe the memory starts to climb up.

sinious
sinious
Legend
December 12, 2012

If they reappear they can't be dropping from memory. Are you using Stage3D? Any chance it's a culling issue or sprites on a plane with no 2-sided textures enabled, etc? Or is this the standard display list?

Ultimately reproducing the issue should be fairly easy if it's memory. Export an app that contains an input field to let you specify the number of instances to generate and a button to trigger it. Create a symbol to instantiate. Vectors are harder on the CPU, bitmaps harder on memory, so I'd use a symbol containing both. To really kill the display list performance apply a yoyo tween to every object so they're all moving a little bit.

Export the app, try different numbers of generated instances and see where the breaking point is.

Something like that would take you less than 10 minutes to code and test. It's a lot easier than trying to diagnose a huge project. If you reproduce the bug then it's ready for submission/fixing. If you can't reproduce it then there's really nothing you can do but go back and look at your own code.

Regardless if it's a bug or your own codes fault you'll need a workaround for Kindle Fires for now..

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