Trail Effect

I’ve been experimenting with a sort of trail effect. I wanted something to give the character that extra feel of movement around the screen. The effect I’m using the pixels from a picture and blurs them to nothing with a host of variables you can change. I created some really nice effects, again lost in pictures, just looks like a blur, but in motion they look really nice. The effect is the trail seems to bleed into the black background, which is in effect is what is happening; the black background is a pixel sprite in itself. As always this worked great in my prototypes but did not go well in project, I really don’t think it is feasible, a particle system is resource intensive, music to particles is 100 x more intensive, and this trail effect is also very intensive with the lot of them together the slowdown was affecting game play. For this reason I doubt I’ll include it but maybe find an alternative, it’s given me ideas for future projects if AS3 doesn’t drive me to suicide.