Maximizing Flash Develop Stability

From As3gaming

This article is syndicated from gamepoetry.com with permission from the original author.

You followed the steps in Free Tools For Making Flash Games and you’re already working on your next game masterpiece. Unfortunately, sometimes you write code that the Flash Player doesn’t like, and unless you’ve set up your project to test with the external player, this could mean you spend the next 10 minutes trying to convince Flash Develop not to die in your functions of evil. Eventually you’ll be forced to use the Task Manager to close Flash Develop and reopen it and try again, but that’s hardly the most efficient workflow. This post is to show you how to set up Flash Develop to test using the external player, so that when your rebellious code tanks, it doesn’t take the whole IDE down with it.

Visit the Adobe Flash Player Downloads page. You’re looking for the Windows Flash Player 9 Projector content debugger. This part is a little wonky so just take my word for it. Download that .exe to a permanent location on your hard drive. I usually create a subdirectory in my Flex 3 sdk dir, c:/flex3sdk/players and put it there. Once your file is in its happy permanent location, double click it. This will open what appears to be a big white blank swf movie. It might seem like it didn’t work, but what you’ve done is registered this debug player as the one to use when using external testing in Flash Develop. It is now associated with the location of the debug player .exe, which is why you only execute it when it has its permanent home. If you move the .exe later, external testing will stop working and you probably will waste 3 hours of your life figuring out what broke it (that was a craptastic day….).

Now that you’ve gotten external testing enabled, you need to set your project to use external testing. When you have your project open in Flash Develop, click on the Project entry in the top menu bar. The last entry in the list is “Properties.” Click that and the project properties panel opens up. At the bottom there is a drop down box titled “Test Movie.” Select “Play in external player.” Press “OK” and then build your game. It should open in a new Flash Player window, isolating the IDE from the running .swf. The beauty of this arrangement is that Flash Develop will still capture traces to its output window, so you really are not giving up any capabilities, just improving your IDE stability. With this new setup, you can safely develop your shady code, without fear of causing an IDE lock up.