Hello,
Recently i was doing some playing around with the latest flash technologies (for use in games) and found that importing assets was difficult and/or time consuming.
Long story short i created a command line app that creates a swc of embedded assets from a folder structure using compc
I’m 90% done (90% left) and am looking for your thoughts on features and things you’d like if you were using such a tool.
Even if you think it’s a terrible idea, let me know why and I’ll try to improve it.
Full disclosure, I am posting this in a few places to try and get some feedback.(but not multiple posts in the same forum)
Thank you in advance for any feedback
Long explanation after the jump
I had a look through some resources to find the best method for doing this, the method i had settled on was to use the [embed] tag.
While this does use some flex libraries* it seemed the easiest way to embed assets.
*(if anyone knows of how to remove this dependency please let me know)
As far as workflow is concerned i needed to pull a large library of assets i already had into the solution.
This is the time consuming part because for all of the assets i have to add a new embed tag.
After more research i found out that you can compile .AS files into an external library (SWC) using the compc compiler.
Now armed with those two things i set about creating something that would make my life easier.
I have created a small application that recursively goes through a folder and adds each compatible asset to a swc.
[LIST]
[]Root
[LIST]
[]file1.jpg
[]file2.jpg
[]Sub1
[LIST]
[*]font1.ttf
[/LIST]
[/LIST]
[/LIST]
It creates a swc from a folder while maintaining directory structure.
This means that all the files will be embedded into the swc and have the appropriate intellisense/type safety expected.
Each folder is represented by a package and each package has a prefix class name (configurable)
So an AssetClass name of MyAssets would yield resources of
Root.MyAssets.file1
Root.MyAssets.file2
Root.Sub1.MyAssets.font1
These are get functions that return a new instance of the embedded file
Options -
You can specify:
• The root folder
• The extensions that are to be embedded (whitelist) [although only from a list of extensions officially supported by the embed tag]
• The AssetClass name (explained above)
Issues –
Compc does not like special characters(non-alphanumeric) or spaces in its class or package names so as such these are not allowed in the directory or file names(they will be skipped).
