I’ve recently decided to take the plunge and start playing around a bit with Papervision3D. I’ve seen too many cool things coming out of that camp and I wanted to get my hands down and dirty and experimenting with the possibilities to move my work forward. I use Eclipse/FDT3 on a Mac so getting up and running with PV3D was relatively simple. Read more »
There are some things that I want to write about on this blog that I feel like I can’t do as of yet because some of them are geared more towards Eclipse/FDT3 users or at least the way I use those tools. That being said, I figured I should give a rundown of how I install Eclipse and FDT3 and how I set up my environment. FDT comes with a hefty price tag, that’s for sure, but it’s well worth it if you are serious about Flash development. If you just want to try it out, there is a 30-day trial so you can use that for now. Read more »
A comment in the post about the fl.* package .swc written by Dimitriy outlined that the package was missing the fl.video package in it. I did a quick test and it indeed was missing (not sure how I missed that before) so I went ahead and did a quick search for the video package and found that Aron Philipp had a proper version of the package. You can now grab his version from the same link that my old version was at or get it directly at his blog.
Thanks Aron, hope you don’t mind me posting it up here.
The other day I had updated to the new FDT 3.0.1 build 1002 and I restarted Eclipse like you usually do when you make software updates. When I restarted Eclipse I got an error saying that I don’t have enough startup memory and to change it in eclipse.ini to be set to -Xmx512m. Of course, my first reaction to this was “English please…” and I couldn’t find the eclipse.ini file on my HD. After some swift Google work I found the solution for OSX.
Go to your Applications/eclipse folder (or wherever you installed Eclipse). Right click on Eclipse.app and go to Show Package Contents. From there, go into the Contents folder and then the MacOS folder. This is where eclipse.ini lives and you can open it up in a text editor. Change the line that reads -Xmx256m to -Xmx512m (just like the cryptic message told us!).
Basically, this allows 512MB to be used in the heap for the JVM which gives you more maximum memory to play with (wow that was nerdy, and no, I didn’t make that up, I don’t talk like that, I just found that on Google :P). Hope this helps!
I usually make a new workspace for every project that I create in Eclipse/FDT and I have to save out my preferences (as you can see on the downloads page) because every time you create a new workspace it resets the preferences to the default. When I originally wanted to do this I found that it wasn’t as easy as I expected so here is a quick rundown of exporting and importing your preferences in Eclipse.
To export, go to File > Export > General > Preferences. Type in your file name (I usually append a .prefs extension to mine, I think I saw that somewhere and just started to use that as a convention) and click Finish. The default settings should be fine.
To import, go to File > Import > General > Preferences. Click Browse to find your preferences file on your hard drive and then click Finish. Voila, all your preferences are loaded!
You’d think this would be as simple as a button in the preferences panel but it was kind of buried in this mess.
I’ve gone ahead and added my FDT 3/AS3 templates and my FDT 3/AS2/AS3 preferences for users who want to download those and use it in FDT 3. I’m not sure how much use you would actually get out of these but I figured I’d post them anyway in case you wanted to try them out. It has my color coding and environment settings so who knows, maybe you’re the stalker type and want to see all that? Enjoy!
Last night I was working on something in Eclipse/FDT 3 where I needed to use the fl.transitions package. I proceeded to import it and got an error saying that the fl.* package could not be found. After some investigation I realized that I needed an .swc file for the fl.* package but I don’t have Flex Builder so I couldn’t create one. This is where my good friend Samuel Agesilas stepped in and created one for me. The thing is, if you go ahead and add the folder that is in Applications/Adobe Flash CS3/Configuration/ActionScript 3.0/Classes (which is where the fl.* package sits on a Mac) to your Linked Libraries in FDT, you’re going to get a duplicate of the playerglobal.swc that is already in your Linked SWCs in Eclipse. That is really messy to me as I like to keep my workspace as tidy as possible so Sam making that .swc for me really helped me out. I’ve posted the .swc on the downloads page or you can get it directly from here.
I was doing some work today in Eclipse/FDT 3 and I kept running into something that I wasn't expecting. In FDT 1.5 I would normally create a movie clip symbol in the Flash IDE and maybe have more clips inside of it, like say a bg_mc and a title_txt. Then, in FDT, I would define the variable at the top of my class so that I could use it in the code later on:
Now, coming over to AS3 and FDT 3, I expected the same behavior. I went about my business in defining my variable at the top of my class and then using it later on in the class somewhere. I went back to Flash to compile the project and got the following in the output panel:
1151: A conflict exists with definition bg_mc in namespace internal.
After some quick fiddling around and Google searching I realized the problem. If you don't want FDT 3 to give you errors and want to be able to declare your instances in the class itself, go into File > Publish Settings > Flash > Settings and uncheck "Automatically declare stage instances". This will prevent the Flash IDE from throwing the error in the output panel and will make Eclipse/FDT happy because you aren't trying to use an instance that you never defined. YAY!
