http://www.sigmagroup.com/ftp/jschorn/preview/soundscape/The result seemed quite flexible and easy to implement. So I thought perhaps other Flash developers might find it useful. Here’s how it works.

I came up to two AS3 classes: SoundCell and Soundscape.  A SoundCell is a circular representation of a sound in space.  As you move closer to the center of the sound from any direction, it becomes louder.  Move to the left of the sound, and it pans to your right.  Move to the right, and it pans to your left.  Move past the radius of the sound and it shuts off.  The SoundCell also has a graphical representation that you can turn on or off so you can position cells. The Soundscape is an object that holds various SoundCells. It includes methods for adding cells, playing cells, and destroying them. Cells can overlap each other—creating some really nice blended sound effects.

Using the classes is easy and below is the step-by-step guide.

1.  Import the Soundscape class.

• import com.sigma.sound.Soundscape;

2.  Create a new instance of the Soundscape class and add it to the display list.

• var mySoundscape:Soundscape = new Soundscape();
• addChild(mySoundscape);

3.  Add the cells you want using the addSoundCell() method. This method takes 6 parameters (filePath:String, xCoordinate:Number, yCoordinate:Number, radius:Number, visible:Boolean, color:Number).

• mySoundscape.addSoundCell(”audio/city.mp3″, 450, 200, 500, true, 0×990000);

4.  When you’ve added all of your SoundCells, then call the start() method to initiate the Soundscape, and the Soundscape takes care of the rest.

• mySoundscape.start();

5.  When you are done with your Soundscape you can destroy it with a call to the destroyCells() method.

• mySoundscape.destroyCells();

I’ve posted the source here.  Feel free to use it and modify it to your heart’s content!

I recently took an online course with John Grden of the Papervision Core Team, and added a whole bunch of optimization strategies to my bag of tricks. The class was offered at the Rich Media Institute.   John is an awesome teacher, and I highly recommend the class if it comes up again. It’s a lot to follow online, but the modules are available for 30 days after the class.  Here are a few helpful strategies that I picked up from John’s course:

1. STAGE QUALITY. Set it to Low or even Medium if possible. High will kill the processor.
2. MIPMAPPING. Keep your texture width and height divisible by 2 (such as 128/256). Avoid odd numbers or decimals and smoothing comes for free.
3. VIEWPORTS. Keep them as small as possible. And do not apply filters to Viewports.
4. BITMAPS vs. MOVIEASSETMATERIALS. Use bitmaps if possible. MovieAssetMaterials, even if they are not animated, cost more.
5. TIMER. Try using a timer for your render loop. It can save you precious processing power. But it won’t play well with timeline animations on your textures.
6. ANIMATION. Set the animation Boolean on MovieAssetMaterials to False when the animation has ended.  Keep animated material as small as possible.  Non-animated materials may be bigger.

John also included a highly useful FramesRipper class in the source code for the course, which I’ve already found useful for a project. It basically takes a movie clip and turns the frames into bitmaps that are stored in an array. The class includes methods for playing the ripped frames just like you would a timeline. If you have a MovieClip with lots of filter tweens or other elements that are taxing the processor, this class works like a charm. The FramesRipper class alone is well worth the price of admission.