Flash AS3 CS4 Project Organisation

Question

I have a large .fla file with all my movieclips (and associated classes) for an entire site in the library.

The whole thing is getting unmanageable - compiling very slowly - and not getting any smaller so I would like to know the simplest way to manage my assets in other fla files to be brought together when the main fla is published.

I would prefer not to load external swfs at run time - I have heard the suggestion to load external SWFs into a ByteArray using URLoader - but would like to know if this is the best practice.

I would appreciate any advice you could offer.

Answer 1

In general it is a very good idea to separate out your application to separate SWFs if at all possible. If that's not possible then instead you could work to separate out your assets into separate FLAs that get compiled into SWCs that your main FLA references.

To do this first create your new FLAs and then go into their publish settings and check the SWC checkbox in the Flash tab. Then go into the AS3 settings (also under Flash in the publish settings) and specify the locations of your SWCs in the "Library path" (they can be relative paths).