Have I mentioned how much I like the BitmapData class? Had a request pass by desk last week asking me to create a little app to be used in a presentation. They wanted it so that when a user clicked on a button in the middle, a star would fly across the screen to a random location, twinkling while it moved, then stay on the screen until the user clicked clear. They wanted somewhere between 30 and 100 stars on the screen.

While I think flash could have handled having that many MovieClips on screen pretty easily on its own, I wanted to see if I could make it more efficient. The solution I came up with was to use two BitmapData layers, one for moving the stars on the screen and creating the ‘twinkling trails’ and the other for housing all the stars in their final resting place.

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