Animation Nightmares

[Rick Harrison]

Hi there,

Ok, so I’ve done a bunch of playing around with
attempts at background animation and I’m running
into the following problems.

I started out with 3 separate animations.  Each one
was fairly large.  Animation 1 was 241 frames
minimum.  Animation 2 was 455 frames, and
Animation 3 was 447 frames.  This was an
important first step even though it presented
some performance issues on an iOS device.

Load time was 40 seconds = unacceptable.

So then I captured the minimum number of
frames that I needed to make it still work which
was unfortunately still 241 frames.  At least
now it combined all three animations into one
larger screen size.  I had a savings of over 50%.

Load time = 19 seconds.  

The problem was that this animation occurs only
on one card and after going to another card
and trying to come back to it again takes another
19 seconds to load that card.  This is still
unacceptable for a wait time.

I thought about putting one image on
each card so the load time for each card
would drop by a factor of 240.  The animation
screams performance wise, and the load
time for each card is great too.

Now I’m stuck with how I’m going to do my
overlaying sprite animations now that each card is
changing in milliseconds.  Do I have to copy each
sprite to each card?  I’ll have to manage all my
control at the stack level instead of at the card
level.  This seems to be turning into a nightmare
for me, and it occurred to me that surely others
have gone down this same path before.

Suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Rick