I was working on some banners lately and with banners, every kilobytes counts. So I downloaded the new version of  TweenLite for AS2 (because I can’t do shit without TweenLite) and noticed so weird behavior (not so weird once you understand about the file size. I mostly has to do with the new plugin architecture, which I wasn’t acustumed to.

When you unpack the downloaded file from TweenLite, there is in there, a very usefull Plugin Explorer to help you understand how plugins work and to generate the code you need to activate only the plugins you want which looks something like:

import gs.plugins.*;
TweenPlugin.activate([ColorMatrixFilterPlugin, BlurFilterPlugin]);

With that code you would activate the ColorMatrixFilter plugin and the BlurFilter Plugin. I tought at first that that would be the only plugins activated and so the Plugin Explorer was telling me that if you activate only these plugin TweenLite should only add 5.5kb to my file.But that wasn’t what I was seeing it was more around 8kb (I know that isn’t much different but when you do banners, you fight for every kb).

Here is the solution

It turns out that when call the TweenPlugin.activate method, even if you say to activate only 2 plugins, it doesn’t deactivate the plugins that are activated by default. In order to do so, you have to go in the file TweenLite.as and comments the lines where these are activated like this:

...
//this starts on line 257 of the TweenLite.as file VERSION: 10.09
 
public function TweenLite($target:Object, $duration:Number, $vars:Object) {
if (TweenLite.timerClip._visible != false || !_tlInitted) {
 
TweenPlugin.activate([
 
//ACTIVATE (OR DEACTIVATE) PLUGINS HERE...
 
//TintPlugin,
// RemoveTintPlugin,
//   FramePlugin,
//   AutoAlphaPlugin,
//    VisiblePlugin,
//     VolumePlugin,
//   EndArrayPlugin
 
//So by commenting these previous lines, these plugins won't be activated thus saving you some kb
]);

You have to get your hands dirty, but in the end you gain a lot of flexibility plus you have only what you need activated.

More stuff on TweenLite

Well I’m always playing with TweenLite, so the other day I was using the ColorMatrixFilterPlugin on some really big MovieClips (9000px large). Well it turns out that Flash isn’t able to do bitmap manipulations (Matrices or Filters) on MovieClip bigger than 2800px.  So my Tweens on them would just not work (not TweenLite’s fault). What you have to do is segment your big MovieClip in chunks of 2800px and do a Tween on each of them at the same time.

Lastly, on the TweenLite website today you could read that Jack Doyle (TweenLite creator) and Grant Skinner (creator of gTween) will be working together on the next version of TweenLite/TweenMax. This can only mean great things for the future of this Tweening library! I look forward to the next version.