[swfmill] as3compile

[Daniel Cassidy]

Hi Richard,

2009/11/5 Richard Humphreys <r_j_humphreys at yahoo.co.uk>:
> - Aha! Looks like that's my problem. I stupidly assumed that the downloads
> from swmill.org were correct. I'll have a play with the newer versions this
> weekend.

My fault I’m afraid. It’s a trap you were bound to fall into -- I’ve
been meaning to update them for a long time but haven’t for all sorts
of reasons I won’t go into.


> - I'm guessing that is this is a very haxe-centric community

It has been historically -- I think that is because swfmill’s major
historical use has been to construct asset libraries for use with
MTASC and haxe, which have no native way to import assets.


> (which is fine,
> it looks like a cool language), but if I get something working in AS3 I'll
> post it in case anyone else is interested (ironically enough it looks like
> Jonas has as similar query posted yesterday).

I’m certainly keen for as3compile and mxmlc to be well supported by
swfmill. The posts by yourself and Jonas suggest that there is pent-up
interest. If you’re able to share your experiences that will be very
helpful to others in the near term, and I will try to work it into
some official documentation in the medium term.

I also did a little of my own investigation yesterday evening and
found that the off-the-cuff advice I offered yesterday is probably not
sufficient for working with as3compile. I was expecting to be able to
do something like this:

swfmill simple assets.xml assets.swf
as3compile -l assets.swf -o example.swf example.as

but -- very briefly since I have not yet examined the output --
as3compile seems to discard most of the contents of the assets swf,
and overwrite any existing classes, whereas haxe merges its code into
the assets swf, preserving most of the existing content. This may mean
that working with as3compile is going to be fundamentally different to
working with haxe. It may be necessary to add some features to swfmill
and/or as3compile itself for interaction between the two to work well.

I will continue with my investigation, but let the list know how you
get on also.


> - I did search things as best I could (and found a few interesting points).
> Am I correct in assuming that the osflash/pipermail archive has no seearch
> functionality? I ended up manually trawling through all the pages for the
> past couple of years.

There isn’t a native search, no. However, the archive is mirrored in
full by Gmane, and thankfully they provide their own search which I
recommend. http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.swfmill

(you can generally use this trick on any public mailing list that has
no native search function).

Dan.