Hi,
Not sure if this should go here (performance) or IOS section, since I mainly have this issue on iOS but I think its on all air players.
When a bitmap (for exemple a bitmap in a fla) is added, you can see with Adobe SCOUT (great tool btw!) that it is uncompressed when added. Allright.
The bad thing is, if it is removed from stage, even if you keep it in memory for reuse, it is very often re-uncompressed when redisplayed. I mean 'often' because it seems erratic. If it stay removed for just a second, most of the time it won't be uncompressed again, but after 3 or more seconds, most of the time it will be (some kind of garbage collector in the "video" memory ?)
Setting its quality to lossless in the fla helps the decompression goes a bit faster (30-40 % I would say), on the detriment of swf size, but does not solve the main question : how can I force an animation (made of bitmaps for example) to never be uncompressed again as long as I dont tell it to to be "disposed" from wherever this is stored ?
Having it permanently on screen hidden somewhere is just too much a performance killer to be considered a solution when you have many. CacheAsBitmapMatrix could be usefull for vector data on this issue (not sure), but drawing a bitmap seems a bit stupid if you do already have bitmaps.
It might not seem a big issue but in a game with effects etc. most of those will only show up once every 2 to 10 seconds, but if you loose 5ms/frame for 40 frames each time one does, and you have many, it really impact performance on devices like ios etc, whereas memory doesnt seem to be the problem here, it happens with low or high memory usage both.
If anyone knows a tip, thanks a lot!
EDIT : Tests made with gpu mode, flash builder 4.7, air 3.5, iPad3 (or other), release build.