Speed of RR vs SuperCard

[livfoss at blueyonder.co.uk]

Thanks to Richard and Ken who replied to my queries on this subject (Revo app runs 'like treacle' on pre-G3 Mac). I found all these comments helpful and am pursuing various lines. However, having talked to my tester, I find that there are two clear areas of 'treacle'. One is my quit sequence, where I close all my substacks and then execute a 'quit' command. This takes several seconds on my 133MHz G3 PowerBook running MacOS 9.2.2, and a lot longer on my tester's machine. Maybe I shouldn't have closed the individual stacks, but even so I can't see what's causing this. What the user actually sees is that the windows of the app all close, but the icon representing the app remains in the Mac's menu bar for a long time after this. This could be a coding error, but I haven't found it yet.

The second one is to do with QuickTime movies, and I certainly see performance problems on relatively fast machines - indeed I have mentioned this before on the list but haven't yet got a good solution. 

I have movies in player objects with scripts that allow the objects to be moved around the screen when the movie isn't playing. The script for the move is just

  on mouseDown
    stop player "mymovie"
    grab me
  end mouseDown

The player is unbuffered (the 'buffer' checkmark is off), because that's the only way I can get the visible object to act like a transparent GIF; if it's buffered it moves a lot more smoothly, but it always looks like a rectangle regardless of my transparency and masking settings. This is a really tough one, and I hope it will improve in 2.0. Meanwhile I am arranging to have the user drag an image of the movie's title frame rather than a player object, and just move the (invisible) player to the final destination and show it instead of the image only when it starts playing, but I'm scared there will be a delay in moving the player object invisibly and in starting it - I'm about to find out.

I'm interested to know if anyone else has tackled this kind of stuff and come up with a good solution.

TIA

Graham


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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France