This is a super valuable tip that has saved me a lot of time and headaches when starting a new project. Do you often find yourself copying frameworks like Tweener, Papervision, Box2D, as3CoreLib, and all the many others into the directory of your latest project? It get’s annoying eh? Well there is a quick and very easy way to solve this problem so you don’t have to always copy them every time you start a new project.

Okay so here’s the deal, you are going to want to create a folder somewhere on your hard drive that you will put all your most used frameworks. Once it’s created put the frameworks in there and you are ready to go.

All you have to do now is inside Flash go to Edit > Preferences (CTRL+U) and click on ActionScript. You’ll get this little window:

Now if you’re class is Actionscript 3.0 then under language select the ActionScript 3.0 Settings… button. If your class is ActionScript 2.0 then select that button instead.

Now you get this screen:

List of Class Paths that can be accessed from any Flash Project.

Alright. So you can see that I make use of this little feature extensively. I’ve added practically every AS3 Project that I use here.  Why? Because I hate copying  Tweener to every project that I write, this universal classpath idea is awesome.

So here’s how you use it, if you can’t tell already, press the little + sign and paste the url to your class here.  You can also click the crosshair symbol and use a GUI to get to the directory you want to add.  Notice that most of my directories end in an src file. This is because the majority of Projects that you will download will start the base directory of the current version with src… particularly if they use subversion.

If you use Flash Develop you can do the exact same thing with it under Project > Properties > Classpaths > Edit Global Classpaths.

Anyway, you’re all set! Happy coding.

Tags: ActionScript, as3, Game Development, gamedev, Tutorial

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 7:37 am and is filed under Quick Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.