Avoiding lengthy Flash compilation times when only external Actionscript has changed

Question

I'm working on a large Flash project (.fla filesize is 80MB, and it takes about 4 minutes from ctrl-enter to swf). I'm not working on the Flash side of it, only on some code in my text editor. These incredibly slow compiles are really putting a crimp in my code-test-code cycle. Is there some way to tell Flash "I didn't change anything in the .fla, recompile only the included .as files and re-link the swf"?

Answer 1

There's no way to do exactly what you're describing. What you can do, though, is break your project into more than one SWF. For example, if the bit you're working on right now is somewhat encapsulated, you could make a new FLA for it, work on it separately, and have the main content load it in at runtime. Alternately, if your main project has any particularly heavy contents (like fonts or audio or video) that are being re-processed every time you publish, you could break that content out into a separate file. (For example, put the audio track in its own SWF, and load that SWF dynamically instead of putting it on the stage.) Of course these changes can be reverted at the end of the project if necessary.

One separate note about audio - if you have audio in your FLA that's getting exported as MP3 or the like, while you're working on the FLA change your audio export settings to "RAW". That way Flash will write out raw audio instead of recoding to MP3 every time, which is one of the slowest parts of publishing. The only downside is that the SWF will get a lot larger, so just put the settings back to MP3 (or whatever) before you export the final version.