Coping with Too Many Layers

August 5, 2006 on 1:04 am | In site updates | Comments Off on Coping with Too Many Layers

Some of the walls are starting to get pretty thick. Cove/eastZ, for example, is already clocking in at 34 layers, and that’s only in the range from September 2004 to February 2006. I have another dozen or so layers still to add before I can bring that wall up to date. This is great for the project, but not so good for the user experience.

The problem is that Flash starts to really bog down and get slow when you have too many objects visible on the screen at one time. So I made a quick little alteration to the code: now it only shows you at most 20 layers at once (15 if you’re viewing the low-res version). The overall effect should be pretty seamless: you might notice a few little corners disappearing from the very bottom of the stack, but it shouldn’t interfere with the experience. If you’re curious exactly which images are currently visible, direct your attention down to the timeline: invisible layers have their timeline icons dimmed, whereas the visible ones are bright white.

Timeline example: only layers 17 and up are visible.