Improving JSFL performance

I'm currently working with JSFL.

What is JSFL? JavaScript for FLash . It's a scripting language that allows to automatize some tasks interacting with Flash GUI to store or edit data.... like here: It stores the keyframe's properties of specific Movieclips.

I have made a levels editor for my game where I can edit the path of enemies too.


I made it using MovieClips where I would detect key frames and store the coordinates in that frame.

I have all Movieclips stored in the library, and the script I generated checks all objects in library to export the relevant data to JSON, but it was taking too long. How long? About 2 mins to process ~10 paths in a 6 core 3.4GHz machine. This is far too long and would make sense the need to optmize code.

I was processing many things but I isolated the problem:  the bottle neck was the keyframes detector function.

function getKeyframes (layer){
   var keyframes = [];
    for(var f in layer.frames){
      if (f==layer.frames[f].startFrame){
            keyframes.push({
            frame:layer.frames[f],
            index:f
         });
      }
   }
    return keyframes;
};

It was taking very long time per MC. I played with code and I finally improved it by changing it to:

function getKeyframes (layer){
   var keyframes = [];
   var layerFrames = layer.frames;
     for(var f in layerFrames){
      if (f==layerFrames[f].startFrame){
            keyframes.push({
           frame:layerFrames[f],
            index:f
         });
      }
   }
    
    return keyframes;
};

After this, the script takes about 2-3 seconds instead of 2 mins.

A note for the reader: I usually optimize all my code but since this JSFL script is only executed every now and then I didn't think it was necessary to optimize it.

I hope it helps to someone!

Thanks for reading!