Project Planning

[trymedo]

Can some people point me in thr direction for a good write up on project planning with flash actionscripting?

I have a project that involves dealing with one fairly large xml document, and using the data in this to generate nearly everything in the scene dynamicaly.

I think I have a rough idea about how to create this but I keep running into problems about half way through.
My code isn't that neat, and I think here lies my main problem. I need a way of structuring the code before I even start writing it...

does that make sense? Does anybody have any valueable tips for me?

Im certain Im not the only one who has problems with large projects...

fyi - the project is flash 6, AS 2.0 (in case anyone was going to point me towards AS 3 tutorials etc)

many thanks in advance.

Tom

[jsebrech]

When a problem is too complex, subdivide it into smaller problems. In this case, see if you can subdivide the parsing task into smaller parse jobs that you can ship off to functions.

[typeguy]

I had the same question.

For what it's worth, You may not have the time but I have read these 2 books from Friends of Ed.
ActionScript for Flash 8:
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590596188
and
Object Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590596196

Good reads and tell ALOT about planning up front and abstraction.

Enjoy.

[kalvin82]

I think the phrase you are looking for is how to "plan the architecture of your program"

in addition to the 2 books that have been recomended, I recomend that you real up on UML.

even if you dont use UML to do the actual planning, understanding the principles and values that shape uml, will help you make better decisions in regards of how to build your program

[rpoy]

For what its worth, there are some open source UML programs that you can download.
http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/

But then a good ol piece of paper works too. AS is pretty new to me but Ive been writing code for quite a while and the principles are the same.

Adding to what jsebrech said, start out looking at the top level. What are the inputs(your xml file)/outputs?
Without getting into the details try and figure out what the steps are and list them. Then figure out what the inputs/outputs of each step are.

Before you know it each step will represent all the basic functions of your program.

[ASWC]

I personnaly like working with external as files which helps m structuring the whole application. I often use a main loader which acts as a main central console, it has no graphics and just #include statements. For example it would have that:
#include "loadingTheXml.as";
#include "createcontentfromXML.as";
#include "positioningcontentandanimation.as";
#include "functionality.as";

these are obvious names so you understand what I mean. I also structure my code as modules, for example one module would load and parse the XML and the second module will load the content but only when the first module says it's ready and so on. That makes everything easy to debug but also I really think this helps me on not having too much bugs.

[Flash Gordon]

For a larger software (and not just flash...this stuff if universal), you need to come up with:

• use cases - this will walk you through how the application will be used
• requirements - a list of requirements that the software needs as determined by your use cases
• a rough UML diagram - before you begin programming have an idea of how it will fit together
• Analyze what you've done and look for places to encapsulate.

With these steps done, now you've just got to implement the code!