I’m playing with FlashDevelop since reading about it on Keith Peter’s blog. It is as he says: stable, slick, and with great features like usable code completion, code folding editor, integrated class explorer (yay!) and lots more I haven’t yet touched. It’s sweet!

I was stuck figuring out the best way to include an external SWF filled with media assets into the build process. Basically, I wanted to generate the following MTASC-equivalent command line:

mtasc main.as -cp classpaths -swf assets.swf -out mymovie.swf -main

What this does is tell MTASC to compile main.as (which then compiles everything else included in it), using the classpaths specified. The -swf switch is the one that will import the media assets, but instead of “injecting” the compiled AS2 into it, I’m specifying a different output file with the -out switch. The last switch tells MTASC to start program execution in the static function main().

There are two ways to specify build parameters in FlashDevelop:

• Edit the Project Settings to set the header parameters and output file, but I haven’t figured out how to add the -swf assets.swf line. I don’t think you can do this in RC2, though this is ideal because I can compile ‘n run by just hitting F5. Instead of invoking MTASC directly, this executes FDBuild.

• Alternatively, I can use the MTASC Quick Build feature, in which you add your additional parameters in a special comment in the source file. The problem with this approach is that QuickBuild applies only to the currently-viewed file, so you have to switch back to your main.as file before you compile. Blah!

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p>Just when I was about to give up and switch back to the Flash IDE, I read here that you can actually add SWFs to the compile chain by right-clicking them in the Project Explorer and selecting add to the library. That’s a much more IDE-ish way of doing things, so I’m happy now. The documentation isn’t entirely clear on this; fortunately I stumbled upon this thread.