I was surfing Hardware Zone and noticed they were running a CANON iPixma printer contest but dang, it already passed. Anyway, the micro site was done in Flash and as usual, you’d find out by right clicking the mouse on the area.
I noticed something new in the flash player 8 menu. There was an option called Redraw Regions. Like a curious puppy, I clicked on it and didn’t see any difference until I clicked on a link and loaded the next page. There were red outlines everywhere. It was like..
..every symbol in boxes! This is what it looks like:
What is the Redraw Regions for?
Provides the ability for the debugger player to outline the regions of the screen that are being redrawn (that is, dirty regions that are being updated). The outlines can also be turned on with the Show Redraw Regions menu option.
I found it really cool because I could literally see how the whole website worked. Well, I couldn’t see the code but it gave me the idea of how the designer made the website work. Even when I used the scrollbar, it showed a few ghost frames.
But the most elite (l33t) thing about the redraw regions was when I used it to the flash game they were using for the contest. Remember I said that the symbols or objects were outlined in red. :)
If you work in Flash, you’ll know that every symbol is normally within a square margin. The only time it isn’t is when you either program the algorithmic numbers of the object like a circle or surround the object with tiny sensors.
So the racing game is the classic move car left and right then avoid items and collect items. With the redraw regions turned on, it was rather easy seeing the objects falling and estimating how close I could get. ;)
So next time you play a Flash game, try to see if there’s the Redraw Regions function. LoL!