Flash Screensaver problem in PC, perfect in Mac

iScreensaver 4 Announcements
1

Hi there,

This is a screensaver that’s built based on a flash file, coded in As3 for flash player 9. Current with iScreensaver, the Mac output is running perfectly (file: http://cdn.media.kiwicollection.com/upload/screensaver/kiwi-dreamsaver-mac-app.zip) However, the PC version (file: http://cdn.media.kiwicollection.com/upload/screensaver/kiwi-collection-dreamsaver-pc.zip), something’s wrong the how it detects the stagesize, or the dimension of the file, the screensaver is not working properly.

If you install the Mac version you can see how it works properly. The flash piece basically dynamically place elements on screen according to the stage size, so the text doesn’t stretch or scale, however the PC version, it seems to fail to do that and everything is stretched. The flash file itself runs perfectly fine on both platforms, however once converted into a screensaver for Mac and PC the PC one doesn’t work properly. Please let me know if there are any specific settings I have to enable for the PC version to work properly.

Thanks!

2

Checking out the screensaver, it appears as if you are using version 4.0.0.294, which is over a year out-dated at this point. If you are the author, please upgrade to the most recent version and try rebuilding the screensaver. It’s important to keep up-to-date as we are continually adding improvements and bug fixes. Also, version 4.3 has the new "Single File installer " for windows which is much easier to use for end-users. See http://iscreensaver.com/downloads.shtml

That being said, we tested it using the latest release (4.3.2) and are still seeing the problem, but only under Windows, just like you said.

There are a couple things to be aware of here:

Issue 1 - when the SWF starts playing, iScreensaver and the OS will create a new window and resize the window a few times before playback starts. So your SWF may see initially see the window size change before reaching the final size – for example, the resize events may look something like this:

400x300
1441x900
1440x900

So in this case, it might make sense for your SWF to start up, show black screen for 1-2 seconds (allow all of the resize events to happen) and then use the final resize as the “correct” one.

Issue 2 - it’s also possible that this is a simple math error in your internal SWF resize code. Getting sizing right with various screen sizes and aspect ratios is difficult. As a test, I opened your SWF in Flash Player (Mac OS X) 10.1 and just played with the window size – I notice that as I adjust the window size, some content gets cropped. Since this is seen this in Flash Player, it’s clearly not an issue with iScreensaver.

Recommendations:

  1. play with window sizing within Flash Player – you will see the issues with content being cut off at smaller sizes. Adjust your resizing logic until this works for you. Once you have this working, then try testing again in iScreensaver.

  2. If your SWF responds to internal stage resize events inside your SWF, make sure that you ignore the first couple events as these may be an intermediate size. Suggest you add a second or two of blank screen (say, 30-50 frames of nothing on the Flash timeline) before animation begins

Please let us know if we can help further. It looks like a cool screensaver. :slight_smile: