How do teams do to work all at the same time on the same .fla file when working with version control?
We are a team of 2 working on a flash game right now and we found that, since it is a binary file, we can't work on the .fla file at the same time or one or the other will need to replace his file (because it's almost impossible to merge).
The best solution we could find for short term, is texting the other "lock" and "unlock" whenever we want to work on the file. Yes, it is very inconvenient, I agree. There has to be a clean solution to this.
So how do big teams manage a binary file with version control?
What would be our alternative?
We use flash cs5 along with bitbucket and TurtoiseHg, if that changes anything.
Thank you for your precious time.
refer a following site:
Flash CS5 and Version Control
Related
I am about to start a new project with Flash Professional CS6 and AS3. My project is a huge one with a lot alot of MCs, coding, pictures ... etc. In a previous project with flash 8, I tried to use several files that were working with each others but I faced a lot of problems in loading and interacting with them. It was hard to control specially when it came to the loading stuff.
I don't know if any has been changed in CS6, But I want your advice. Should I use my old strategy by using many files? or should I dump all thing in one huge fla file?
In either case, what will be the best way to arrange the assets, codes, ... etc so they will be well organised and easy to work with in coding and yet give a high performance.
Thank you in advance.
You should go with several source files, especially if your project is huge.
First of all, create dedicated .fla file for UI components and small/handmade elements, — assets.fla and compile it as assets.swc.
If you will compile project by the help of Flash Professional CS6 (but I would recommend some IDE...), you will have one more .fla file, main.fla, It's your entry point with Document Class, and connected libraries(mostly .swc files)
Images, huge animated scenes, all these stuff are external: Bitmaps, swf files you will load in runtime, and unload/dispose, for freeing memory.
Actually, It's an art to organise project, so It will be easily scaleable, and without problems you could work in team, and not interfere with each other
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 have one swf file, it is JW Player plugin. It have one actionscript file in which is whole plugin code, and rest of files are jwplayer api files. So i need to open that file (where whole plugin code is) and edit few lines. But there is a problem, because when i try to decompile file with sothink swf decompiler (and few others) - to convert it to .FLA, decompiles simply crashes. It is because of some file from jwplayer api library. So, next thing i tried is to edit via HEX (because there is not much to be edited), but i couldn't find what i needed. So what i need is - is there any way or not? If yes, which program can be used for this?
I've had to do something similar in the past. In my scenario, the client had the SWF but no FLA. I needed to change a hardcoded url and sothink wasn't decompiling but I could view the AS in the sothink previewer. Luckily for me the flash wasn't very complex so I was able to copy the AS and graphics out and start a new project. I would imagine that JW Player is much more complex so this may not be an option for you, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
Depending on your needs, you may be able to get what you want by using the plugin API to extend the functionality or maybe even by customizing a skin.
I'm wondering about MP3 decoding/encoding, and I was hoping to pull this off in Flash using AS3
I'm sure it'll be a right pain...
I have no idea where to start, can anyone offer any pointers? reference material?
----much later---
Thank you all very much for your input... It seems I have a long road ahead of me yet!
You could also theoretically do this as a PixelBender filter, and should get significantly better performance than using a pure ActionScript 3 implementation.
More info on PixelBender here:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Pixel_Bender_Toolkit
mike chambers
mesh#adobe.com
this would help
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
See LAME MP3 Encoder. You can checkout their source code and their link page. Mpeg.org should have documents too.
I've got a project converting WAV files (actually Asterisk voice mails) into MP3's. If I remember correctly there are some oddities about Lame's license, so I've downloaded and compiled first LAME, then SOX by hand.
I have a web process written in PHP to actually convert the files from WAV to MP3 on the web server's local file system (actually PHP is just supervising the command-line sox tool via exec()). Then I attach all the metadata the MP3 needs using the PEAR Mp3_Id package.
Then I move the newly constructed MP3 file into a folder Apache is sharing, and point the outstanding SoundManager2 flash-based MP3 player at it.
For small transactions this works very well -- converting a minute or two voice mail does not add any appreciable lag to actually rendering and returning the rest of the page. As I get more users on a single server, it will probably eventually become necessary to write a cron job or something to do the conversion before the user actually asks for the file the first time.
It's going to be VERY slow doing this in AS3. You really need a C/C++ implementation if you care at all about how long it will take.
Andre Michelle and the Hobnox guys pulled off something similar with their Hobnox AudioTool, they ported a Java Vorbis encoder to AS3. They supposedly ended up with encoding taking twice the time of the audio duration.
Don't know what your use case is, but in the Hobnox tool apparently audio is created at the client side, encoded as Vorbis, sent to the server, converted to mp3 and stored in the users library.