Dear Adobe,
WTF does this DisplayObject property actually do? And why does it only seem to work when done with code and not the check mark in the IDE? Here’s what I think it should be doing it should be taking a snapshot of that DisplayObject and all its nested children and displaying it as a bitmap, much like Director’s image property. Now when should that snapshot change? I’d assume it’d change only when anything in it actually changed. However I don’t find this to be the case. A perfect example is a TextField nested in a MovieClip. I set cacheAsBitmap to true, both in the IDE & code to both the TextField & MovieClip, animate it and get all those known issues of animating TextFields on subpixels. This shouldn’t be the case if it were a bitmap and if you zoom in (rt-click) on the object you can see the text is still vector and not raster. So as per usual the workaround here is to create a bitmapData and take your own snapshot of the DisplayObject, but isn’t this exactly what cacheAsBitmap is supposed to do? The only success I ever had with this property is for creating alpha masks, but again this MUST be done in code cause it doesn’t work if you do it in the IDE. Flash is akin to What You See Might Not Be What You Get or better yet don’t believe your eyes, or mind, when it comes to Flash.
Flashing you,
(-o|o-)