Creating a SWC image/file library at runtime using external files

Question

I'm working on a Flash GUI project which has many images need to be dynamically loaded at runtime.

Problem: Currently everytime a class initializes, it loads its assets (images) from HDD, but that usually takes too long (for example: I have a list of 100 items, each item has the same background, which is a PNG image stored on HDD, but it has to load the image 100 times from HDD to render the list, because the item's class gets to be initialized 100 times). Also, I want assets to be hidden from the users, so I want to pack it up somehow, into a single file.

Solution: I think of SWC. I heard it's sort of library for Flash. But I have almost no experience on working with SWC. And there are too many images, would take very long to manually import and put class name for each of them in the FLA library. But I already have an XML file which stores the class names and the path to each class' assets. So I can load all the images into a variable, but I don't know how to actually write that variable into a SWC file on HDD to load it later as a library.

[MyButton.png] --load to RAM--> [myButton:Bitmap] --write to SWC file on HDD--> [Assets.swc] --import the SWC file at runtime--> [addChild(assets.myButton)]

The text in bold is the part I'm missing.

Thanks for your time! Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

SWC is a file that you "precompile" it's pretty much the same as a swf, but really nothing that you "create on the fly". The biggest difference is that a swc is something that is "compiled into" an swf and not loaded dynamically. That is, you can't load a swc-file during runtime, it is provided during compile time.

So, every picture added to the swc will increase its' size, the good thing is that it can be shared between different swf-files.

Now, correct me if I understood you wrong, but it seems like you reload the picture from hard drive whenever that picture is used? So 100 instances of "Ball" which is linked to the picture "Ball.png" would load that file 100 times?

If that is the case, why not just create an ImageManager and let that one keep one instance of the loaded images and then share it among all the instances that uses that image?

AFAIK there is no easy way to do this, however I wrote a blog post (since I couldn't find a better way to give you that solution) if you are interested in an example with caching loaded images.

It's pretty naive and revolves around a static ImageManager, loading only images, caching them by their url-id and then providing a new instance of the bitmapdata if they are allready loaded. However, it works like a charm and it is WAY MORE efficient than always loading the image from hard drive.

You can find the blog post here: http://messer1024.blogspot.se/2012/12/caching-loaded-images-in-as3.html