C Preprocessor for ActionScript / News: Recent posts

Rolled all the little builds/tools into one zip in the 'downloads' folder.

Numerous bug fixes, updates, etc. that sat in the subversion repository, where lots of people probably never noticed.

Ant + 'Complete' builds got AIR support in them.
Ant build checks to see if it needs to build before it rebuilds.
Just drag it out of subversion. It's easier for everyone that way.

A project that builds under Apache Ant, with no other tools. Preprocessing achieved through filterchain tasks.

Changed mechanics of this build to publish a 'final' output of the builds to the 'deploy' folder and stop copying the deploy contents to the various bin/bind/binp folders. ONE version of configuration and language files now exists in the project, so people don't edit the wrong one and lose their changes. So the 'deploy' folder is also the version that could be deployed to a web site.

Now supports 'skin' swf files that don't check source depends and get built less often. A good place to dump 'dumb' menu art with no external code dependencies, but embedded fonts and things that take forever to export.... read more

Removed the unique need in the Flex build to specify subdirectories of the src tree. Just recursively grabs them all, now.

Fixed a bug in the example that quit working under Flash Player 10.

Add a 'simplified' build that's made of scripts/batches for BASH/windows. No dependency scan, just rebuilds every time. The scripts act as better examples, and simplify making compound builds composed of many FLA/mxmlc sub-projects that need to be exported/built in a particular order. The jsfl script works with Flash 8/CS3/CS4, but I'm still testing. The example runs when built with Flash 8 or Flash CS3, but not CS4/Flash 10, so I need to look at some of the security settings and sort that out.

The flex build using gnu tools now supports a mix of .as and .mxml files. It no longer uses .as3 file extensions (rename them to .as in the source folder). M$ nmake hit a big roadblock on the mixed as/mxml files that I didn't feel like going around.

Updated file release things, though you can still get the same zip files with 'svn browse'.

There's now a 'Flash' folder that contains a make that works either in Windows with Flash 8 or Flash CS3, or in Linux with Flash 8 run under Wine. Enjoy.

The MinGW installer now gets only normal release MinGW files from sourceforge again, and implements a work-around for Vista that doesn't need patched builds. You are limited in where you can install your mingw directory tree, but cpp works again, so the build's faster

Well, the MINGW tools work in Windows and XP now. It uses a version hacked for the MAME project, and I had to invoke CPP through gcc, so it's a bit slower than it was. Until there's a stable patch to MINGW posted that fixes the Vista incompatibilities, this will be a little wonky.

It appears that Vista has buggered (among other things) the MinGW tools. So, I will have to find a work-around for that, since nobody has seen fit in all this time to bother with putting up a MinGW release with a fix. A thousand different 'patches' on the problem from other people, but no fixed release from the MinGW folks.

Wrote a makefile target (only in the GNU one, right now) that will generate the contents of an obfuscate.h file that can be used to make reverse-engineering your Actionscript code a much more miserable task. Generates a list of function, var and const symbols, alphabetizes them and assigns them _1, _2, _3... etc. You must avoid using symbols built into Flash for your variable and function names, but after that it becomes quite simple to make the code much less friendly to abcdump, and future decompilers.

The filters/cppfilter.c tool now makes some exceptions for certain file types (.xml,.as,.as3) that break the line count (error call-outs will mismatch afterwards) but does allow you to slurp other files into your file unconditionally, also invoking the preprocessor on them as it goes.

The 'include' keyword in AS3 is too picky. The #include keyword in CPP doesn't care about what sort of file extension or how or where it's placed syntactically in the code. It also allows some more extensive template work.... read more

Made the example a little 2D path-finder for AS that might come in handy.

Added a 'prettyprint=true' setting to the build. This allows you to make a more readable pre-preprocessed build, to share it with people more easily (i.e. an artist you don't want to lead through ALL of the setup), or if you change your mind about the whole 'preprocessor' thing. Also verified it can build and debug under Adobe Flash CS3 with minor caveats (see the Project Web Site for details.)

Made sure it builds with (free) Visual C++ 2005 Express as the IDE. Also broke up pp.h as it was starting to get a little big.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx

Fixed Makefile to 'detect' OS and invoke appropriate kinds of shell commands based on what it discovers.

Only tested under BASH shell in RedHat and under Windows XP and 2000, which have 'OS' set to 'Windows_NT' by default.

Verified to build under BASH. Linux users will need to delete three lines and uncomment three lines in the cpp2mxmlc.mak file to make it work. There's no test in the Windows version of Make to determine how buggered backslashes are in the mkdir calls, and to decide which 'if not exist' test should be called at the end. Maybe I'll figure out a 'better way' some day, or maybe I'll just live with it.

There's an nmake compatible makefile, .NET compatible example project and batch files to invoke nmake in an MSVC environment.

In .NET (or visual studio 6, albeit ill-behaved) the errors come up in Visual C format and show up in the 'To Do' list like normal errors.

Welcome to the Makefile and C Preprocessor for the Flex 2 SDK.

Currently, there is no file release, because I couldn't get it working with SF's newfangled new file release interface. You can browse SVN and get BlankProject1.0.zip from there.

The README.txt file has the relevant setup and requirements.