Situation
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I'm coding an as3 video game and I'm rather surprised when I'm checking the size of my project compared to the compiled swf.
My project size 28 mo.
- assets is 26 Mo
- src is 2 Mo
When I'm compiling it with embedded images, I get 242 Mo swf.
When I'm compiling it without any embedded resource, I get 18 Mo swf.
Question:
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How can assets simply embedded in a project goes from 26 Mo to (242 - 18 =)224 Mo ?
(I'm looking for a technical answer).
Notes:
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I don't have any issue whatsoever concerning runtime.
I understand I have to use a loader and not embed big resource in my project, I just want to know why.
Perhaps your assets are somehow getting included multiple times. Luckily, there are some tools out there that can help you figure out what's going on:
In Adobe Flash CC (and similarly in other versions) you can go to File -> Publish Settings -> Flash (.swf) -> Advanced and check the box Generate Size Report. This will output some text in the output panel on publish that shows you the sizes and categories of everything in your swf.
Or, you could try the Visual Size Report add-on. Never tried it myself, so not sure if it's good or not.
If you're using FlashDevelop, and have a .swf as part of a project, you can see some details about its size. Here's an example.
Finally, if you're compiling with flex and mxmlc, you can add the -link-report filename option to generate a report that'll help you out.
Related
Yesterday I started messing around with Adobe Scout. It gave me a message that said that my function times are not accurate because I'm running a debug mode (in a file that is compiling as an AIR app) and to try compiling a published version first. Thus began my foray into the exciting world of AIR certificates and Windows Installer packages. I made certificate, published it, opened the published package, installed it, opened the resulting file, and found... fanfare ... a rectangle object I draw with AS3 and nothing else. When I test the movie (debug version) in AIR, it has the rectangle as well as a 20x20 map of tiles that are created at runtime from a bitmap that is blitted into 16x16 tiles.
Huh? Do I need to do something special when publishing for AIR to embed the library item? Anyone have this issue publishing to AIR where library assets are unavailable at runtime?
Of course I'll post code if anyone thinks they would like to see it, but it all works fine in flash player, fine (albeit slow) in Adobe AIR for Desktop (when testing), just missing library assets when published and installed via Windows installer.
update
for that matter, when I publish a swf for playback on the web or flash player, a similar thing: just a colored background (per my .fla file settings) but no rectangle and no blitted bmp tiles. Could I be executing code before something is loaded, and when it is in a debug mode, the setup takes longer, so things have time to get loaded before trying to execute? I've tried to avoid this, but maybe failed?
So, apparently making an .exe file or AIR app doesn't stand alone from the library components. Their is probably a way to embed them in the project, but for my purposes, I found that just making sure that the .exe and necessary .png files are in the same source file solved the issue. The problem was that my .exe file was automatically getting compiled and saved into a different folder, so I thought that folder must have all the needed files in it.
So, the bottom line is just that an .exe or AIR file, when published, won't automatically have the needed files in the right places. It still needs to point to the correct file location for those files.
At first i was using [Embed] to load in textures for a game.
I then went through the process of moving all the assets into the library.
The program is working fine, however the "Exporting SWF" takes absolutely ages now. It seems like it's doing an awful lot to process these library assets or something.
Is there any way I could reduce this time?
I wish to avoid going back to Embed if I can.
This might change your workflow too drastically, but my method to avoid this issue is to compile using a code editor (my preference is FlashDevelop, but FDT or Flash Builder work too), and to include any assets authored in the Flash Professional IDE by pre-exporting them to an SWC.
It means there are two steps to perform a complete compilation: the first to export the assets from Flash Pro to SWC (which is still slow), and the second to actually compile the SWF using the SWC and your code (which is much quicker). If you edit your assets as often as your code, this won't save you time at all, but in my experience I'll make many more tweaks to the code once the assets are in place, and overall it saves me time.
To start doing this, you can export an SWC from Flash Pro by going to File > Publish Settings, then checking the 'SWC' option (and unchecking 'SWF'). You can set the SWC path to something convenient for your code editor. Then in FlashDevelop, for example, you would include the SWC in your project (right click and 'Add to Library'), which allows you to access any classes that were set to 'Export for ActionScript' in the Flash Library.
Once it's all set up, I use SHIFT-ALT-F12 to publish from Flash, then tab over to FlashDevelop where the changes will be picked up, ready to compile directly from there.
today I opened my flash project in CS6 and after it opened in the output I receive this message: "Could not load scene into memory. Your document may be damaged." The only problem I saw was the flash component (textInput, and button) that I use for my project. They was transformed smaller and I can select them. :-o And the problem is that try to open the previous version of the project and I found the same error. I think the only problem is FLASH COMPONENT. How can I make everything like it was (flash component). Is something about library ?I saw in library the TextInput are appear like symbol of component (3cubes).
Thank you for help!
Possible causes / solutions:
Your .fla was originally authored on a computer with a different operating system. Try opening it on the computer it was created.
Your .fla might have been made with a different version of Flash. Make sure you are opening it in the same version of Flash.
Your .fla might have been corrupted. If you look in the folder and it says the file size is something like 7kb, then your .fla file is seriously corrupted. Hopefully you have backups if this is the case.
Unfortunately it doesn't work in some fast way so I had to change all my flash components in the library. After I changed, the new components was looked also strange. But I didn't receive that error again and I can go ahead with my project now. Thank you anyway...
I already made a game with flash, and I want to provide an easy download for people that would rather play offline. Thing is, i use a folder whole structure to dynamically load content per level. Folder structure looks like this, not that it matters that much:
Game folder
animations
anim1.swf
anim2.swf
sounds
music1.mp3
soundeffect1.mp3
levels
level1.lev
level2.lev
myGame.swf
How should I go to distribute this? Should I just resort to make a zip file for the flash game and assume people know how to extract and open the swf? Is there any other way to port easily as an executable? Perhaps Adobe Air (not sure if this works though)?
Thanks, and please help!
Distributing a zip file is the only option if you really want that structure to prevail. Else,
Embed all the resources in the main (myGame) swf & distribute it.
Provide a html page for people who do not have standalone flash player installed.
Embedding as a single file allows the browser to cache the single swf & allow the player to keep playing offline until cache is cleared. So user might not even need an explicit download.
If you are using Flash Builder it is fairly straightforward to compile the application into a self-installing AIR executable (or DMG on a Mac). It is possible to include the AIR runtime which would avoid potential problems of the user not having the correct flash player for example.
An alternative to AIR would be to create a projector executable from inside the standalone Flash Player or from the Flash authoring environment.
Another option to using a zip file would be to use a free installer creator such as InnoSetup or Nullsoft on Windows, or Packager on Mac. Linux users are generally more tech savvy and so a tar would probably be well understood.
Adobe AIR works wonderfully! I use it for my own project, and your project should transition over to it with little to no modification (any issues should show up in the Compiler Errors and Output). The only downside is that, past AIR 2, there isn't any Linux support.
The other option is obviously to create a standalone .SWF projector inside a zip or installer, but in my opinion, that isn't the sleekest way to deploy for desktop. The advantage of AIR over this is that it gives you access to additional desktop functions that Flash Player doesn't.
I've got an AS3 project where I'm trying to compile in several images, a soundtrack, and a video via [Embed] metadata. It's a product requirement that these be embedded, so network transfer is not an option.
I'm getting some really strange behavior - a sort of intermittent corruption of the compiled-in data. Sometimes after the project compiles, I run the swf and it closes immediately and writes "Warning: Failed to parse corrupt data" to the flash log. If I delete the binary and clean the project, sometimes it'll run fine after building it again. Sometimes it doesn't.
This is probably the strangest part about this problem, but sometimes when I see that error, I can physically move the video [Embed] lines to the end of the file, then clean the project, and it will build and run no problem. Sometimes I move them back to the beginning of the file and it builds and runs fine.
It kinda seems like it might be a bug in the compiler. Has anyone else experienced something similar? I'm targeting Flash 10.1 and using sprout (http://projectsprouts.org) to build my project. This is the mxmlc line that's being used to compile (mxmlc Version 4.1.0 build 16076):
mxmlc -as3 -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true -debug -default-background-color=#ffffff -default-size 712 400 -output=bin/ProjectName.swf -source-path+=.preprocessed/src -source-path+=.preprocessed/assets .preprocessed/src/ProjectName.as
I've tried both removing the -debug compiler option and adding the -optimize option, but no luck.
Everything is being ran through the GNU C preprocessor for some other tasks, so maybe I'll try removing the preprocessor stuff and hardcoding those variables...I'll try that and post the results tomorrow.
Any insight at all would be much appreciated. Thanks!
EDIT:
This project is going to be compiled dynamically with different assets being embedded into the same codebase, so switching to something like Flash Builder for compilation really isn't an option...it must be done via command-line mxmlc.
UPDATE:
Turns out the corrupted data message was due to images created with Photoshop's "Save for web" feature. If I save them outright as PNG images I don't get the message. However, the intermittent nature of the movie compiling properly still seems to be an issue. Now sometimes when the project is compiled it won't throw any compiler errors, but I get a blank flash player window. Right clicking in flash player shows a context menu with a message that says "Movie not loaded..." This doesn't appear to have anything to do with things being ran through CPP first.
[Screenshot]
This is apparently a bug in mxmlc under Mac OS X. After posting this, I observed some other really strange behavior, so I switched the whole codebase to Windows 7. Everything works as expected there (still using Project Sprouts as a build tool).
Flash builder is fine with it.
Can you separate your issue for video or music only, or issue is true for both includes?