Category Archives: Quick Tips

Quick Tip: Actionscript 3 Memory Management – Properly Removing Objects from Memory

* This is a republish from my previous lab. The original publish date was Apr 17, 2010.

Introduction

In working on projects and experimenting with memory management in Actionscript 3, I’ve come across a simple but very important checklist to properly remove objects from memory. The solution comes from looking back at chapter 14 of Essential Actionscript 3 by Colin Moock. The excerpt that triggered the light bulb above my head comes from the section “Disposing of Objects Intentionally” on page 273. It reads, “To eliminate all references to an object, we must manually remove it from any arrays that contain it and assign “null” (or some other value) to any variable that references it.”

The problem I had involved arrays. I thought removing objects that were in the array from the display list and setting their values to null as well as nulling the array itself would be enough. This isNOT the case however, you need to also manually remove the object from the array.

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Quick Tip: Fixing Dynamic TextField Cut-Off in Actionscript 3

* This is a republish from my previous lab. The original publish date was Aug 6, 2009.

Recently I was working with the TextFormat class and dynamic TextField instances in Actionscript 3 and was noticing a slight rendering error. It seemed as if some of the beginning and ending characters in the text field were being slightly cut-off. After doing some research I found the culprit and the solution as well. I found that the TextFormat object I was using to format the text of the TextField object(s) wasn’t being fully utilized.

The TextFormat object has two properties which can be used to fix this “cut-off” of text. They are the rightMargin and leftMargin properties and setting them will help to reduce and/or remove this “cut-off” effect (depending on the value set).

In my solution I used a value of 1 pixel for each property and ended up with my desired results. The value you use will be dependent on the placement of the TextField instance in accordance with other content as well as the font being used. This find was a simple yet effective solution. Simply setting the leftMargin and/or rightMargin properties of the TextFormat object that is formatting your TextField(s) instances will do the trick. Just ask yourself which side the “cut-off” is occurring and set a value to the correct property (trial and error the values until desired result is achieved).