[Q] What is the best project when working with multiple team members for the project?

[CyanBlue]

Howdy...

I basically was working as one man show band when workiing on a project... I did all the design and all the scripting and such... (Maybe that's why they were all crappy... )

Anyways, I have a project that I need to work with somebody else who basically will take care of the design part and some scripting and I take care of the rest...

We are working remotely... So, I upload my daily copy to the FTP server and he does the same... I download what's the latest on his copy and add whatever change is necessary to that file and upload my copy again and he does the same...

What's the best way to ensure that he doesn't touch my stuff and I don't touch his stuff???

Thank you...

[JHallam]

Get your server to allow 2 different users and set the rights for each, so he can only view certain colders etc

Ask your server support, they will do that for you.

[freddycodes]

You are in desperate of some sort of versioning system. Something Like Visual Source Safe or cvs. If you are on a shared host, most likely this will not be an option. But this is the BEST way for multi-member teams to work in a collaborative env with minimal chance for loss of one person's changes.

[CyanBlue]

Thank you for the replies, guys...

Yeah... CVS system is a good choice if I were doing the, say, PHP project... But I don't see how it can be applicapable to the Flash project...

It sure will be very hard to document all the changes in Flash...
For example, let's say that I am making a simple menu with attachMovie() function... The designer does take care of the development of the icon, and the developer takes care of the population...
There is are variables like iconWT and iconHT which the developer needs to use for spacing them in the populated movie, and they are set to 20 each since the original icons were 20 x 20... The script works well...
But what if the designer gets the file and change the icon to be 30 x 30 and forgot to change the iconWT and iconHT accordingly??? That will only mess up with the populating the menu...

That's very little example, and there should be whole lot more things that might make the collaboration hard to maintain...

Any more insight would be appreciated...

[Colin Campbell]

Maybe with every uploaded .fla/.swf, write a little text file documenting all the changes. that would be one way to do it, but it definitly wouldn't be a full solution. More a tip.

[freddycodes]

You should be using some sort of ini file for that or XML file. an ini file would be easier to handle. You could store those sorts of values in an external source, and load that in as the first action in the movie, You can then use those variables in your movie, and to change one you simply edit the ini file.

Example.

l = new LoadVars();
l.load("config.ini");
l.onData = function(raw)
{
    _global.config = {};
    var delim = (raw.indexOf("\r\n") > -1) ? "\r\n" : (raw.indexOf("\r") > -1) ? "\r" : "\n";
    var tmp = raw.split(delim);
    for(var i=0;i<tmp.length;i++)
    {
        var line = tmp[i].split("=");
        _global.config[line[0]] = line[1];
    }
}

//Now you can access the config stuff from anywhere as for instance
//_global.config.iconWT 

[CyanBlue]

Howdy, guys...

Hm... Yeah... That external data that takes all the necessary variables in the external file would be one way to solve the problem in the scripting part... Thanks...

[freddycodes]

Oops

I forgot the ini file contents.

iconHT=20
iconWT=20
name=CyanBlue

[CyanBlue]

Thanks freddycodes...