And that would pretty much be my question today, fellow AS3ers.
Ever since I got the hang of AS3 and discovered FlashDevelop, I pretty much abandoned [FONT=Courier New]fla[/FONT].
Back in the days, before switching to it, lack of alpha channel support by the [FONT=Courier New].jpg[/FONT] format was a non issue, since Flash IDE allowed to embed [FONT=Courier New]png[/FONT] images in the library and apply lossy jpeg compression to them while retaining their transparency data.
Programmatically, however, I’m only able at the moment to embed either flat jpegs, or lossless, consequently unacceptably large, transparent pings. (Indexed [FONT=Courier New]gif[/FONT] is not practical in the context/nature of the pictures to be embedded.*****)
So… punch line: Is there a way to “JPEG-ize” pings at compile time using only code? Perhaps there are some parameters to follow [FONT=Courier New][Embed(source = ‘transparent.png’)[/FONT]… that are not known to me? Obviously, I’m aware of such acrobatics as loading/embedding a external [FONT=Courier New]swf[/FONT] published from Flash IDE containing the bitmaps, or storing the alpha channels separately, ets but I wonder if this can be done elegantly to satisfy code purism.
Thank you very much for your time.
*****[SIZE=1]While GIF is great for storing pixel art, icons and whatnot, for smooth/soft images using way over 256 colors, its quality/compression ratio is rather unfavorable. Additionally, it only supports 2-bit transparency i.e. aliased edges.[/SIZE]