Signs Of Life – 'nuff said.
An email from the project Producer (Garry) on May 25th.
“Oh happy day. We have successfully delivered Signs of Life to the BBC today for acceptance testing, on time, on budget and online;)
When we can finally send ’round a URL I’m sure you’ll agree it is a thing of beauty and a fine testament to skill and talent of the many people that have made it possible.
The BBC are planning to launch the project with a good publicity splash in September.
I look forward to sending invites to our wrap party, as soon as we have it planned.
Best wishes
Garry Samett
Executive Producer”
‘On time, on budget…’ – it don’t get any better folks!
Tracking down your Eclipse errors
I just read a useful tip on Andy Jarret’s blog... To read your Eclipse error logs from within Eclipse follow this path thru the menus…
1. Window >> Show View >> Other >> PDE Runtime >> Error Log
Here’s another extremely useful link for Actionscript developers using Eclipse/FDT/MTASC
I remember it came in handy when trying to track down something I thought was an ANT issue… We’d successfully automated our project deployment tasks for a large Flash project I’m working on but ANT seemed to stumble every time we tried to automate the compilation of our SWFs.
Everything seemed fine when we did manual builds using the ‘Run’ task in Eclipse, but transferring these to an ANT build failed, without any useful feedback other than a ‘Build Failed’ message in the Eclipse console. Our in-house Eclipse guru came to visit, with no success, but I learned some valuable Eclipse practices just watching him… the first was that double-clicking the tab for the active script editor expands the script window to fullscreen (essential when your employer won’t spring for dual-monitor developer workstations), and the ability to view the Eclipse error logs was the other one.
And despite Eclipse not being the final culprit, seeing that Eclipse wasn’t our problem pointed us in the right direction to track down the real issue. I wish I could remember the details, but we needed to look closely at our use of ‘header’, ‘-out’ and ‘-swf’ because somewhere in the command line we were issuing conflicting commands. The result was that we were outputting an empty SWF and MTASC was reporting success. Apparently the MTASC compiler will treat the ‘-swf’ parameter differently depending on the context it’s used in. In our case we needed to understand when we were creating our SWFs from scratch, and when we were injecting code into existing SWFs, and use the ‘-swf’ and -out’ parameters in the correct context… So we changed our ANT scripts accordingly and voila! Automated compilation AND deployment scripts, for everyone!
Promotional video from my current project
It’s nice to work on a project that’ll have the BBC promoting it… Here’s the first draft of the video that’ll be used sometime in September when it’s launched.
