[henning]

does anyone know how you write code to implement drawing operations like this efficiently? i remember in the late 90s there was stuff you could do, for instance, where you had a large number of low-opacity swirling ellipse objects that looked like smoke (basically a very crude particle system) - and it brought my Pentium 3 450 to its knees. (this is what i'm referring to: http://www.presstube.com/project.php?id=212 )

have computers just gotten faster, or does Flash have some way of doing, say, hardware-accelerated graphics?

[jey]

Try the new HTML <canvas> tag. But yes, Flash can do all sorts of animation and drawing pretty efficiently.