ALWAYS do a border clip around you swiffs!

written by Dennis on October 10th, 2009 @ 03:06 PM

Let’s first make clear what I’m talking about:

swiff is what the web says ”.swf” files are called – and ”.swf” files are compiled flash files.
A border clip is a Movieclip (or display object of any kind) at the top most layer of your flash stage that leaves the normal visible area of you game visible, but adds a large border around it that hides everything outside.
always means always!

So the problem is that if you embed your swiff into a website and the embedding container has a larger size than your game resolution, everything outside is also visible, like you can see here (click it!):

(that’s from xhry.cz)

It’s not that I haven’t been aware of this before… I already knew it. But let’s say I simply forgot about it, or maybe I thought “the flashgame portals will for sure use the correct dimension for embedding…”. Now the game is out there on more than 1000 different servers and there are more than just a few that use a larger dimention (e.g. even AddictingGames does, and that’s really painful). Don’t take this too easy, it really kills the ratings!

So please learn from my stupidity and make a border around your flash content. Period.