Sprite Sheets for Flash (particularly Scaleform)
Comments (0) It is a bit counter intuitive to a Flash developer, but in Scaleform (swf for video games) it is more efficient to take all your bitmaps and put them in a single png. You then take specific rectangles in that png and use them for your bitmap image symbols. I had to do this on a recent project, and decided to build a tool using the swf format library I made a while back.
It ended up not being fully automated due to time constraints (I had some trouble recreating the file exactly with the new bitmap info and only needed a few swfs converted that were easy enough by hand). What it does is parse the swf finding all images, consolidate those onto a single png, and then output all the name/rectangle information. To create the rectangles in Flash, you can copy the output to the jsfl below (replace the array contents), and put that in your commands folder — then run it from the ide (be sure ‘no fill’ is set). Place the broken apart bitmap on the same layer, and you can copy and paste into symbols.
var rects =
[
{X:67,Y:614,Width:316,Height:32},
{X:780,Y:274,Width:38,Height:38}
];
var dom = flash.getDocumentDOM();
for(var i = 0; i < rects.length; i++)
{
var r = rects[i];
dom.addNewRectangle({left:r.X,top:r.Y,right:(r.X + r.Width),bottom:(r.Y + r.Height)},0);
}
One day I may finish this, it would be nice to get into the build system, and even put on a dial. Also some images may be best left unmapped for various reasons, it would be nice to mark those.
Download (it is the SwfBitmapPacker project, requires VS2008 Express and windows)
