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petzoldt01 0 Light Poster

Not sure if this is quite the place for my question, but I dunno why you couldn't handle it ;) Really just looking for some opinions/answers on develop/design workflows for small/medium projects using AdobeCS5.

This week I discovered many of the magics between Illustrator/Flash, such as arranging symbols on an artboard, giving them appropriate instance names, and then importing that .AI file to the Flash Stage (where everything is right where I left it, even the instance names, so now my actionscript can kick off without fuss).

What I find myself wanting is a way to update these symbols in a managed fashion. Right now I am deleting all the old symbol instances from the Library, and then re-importing my .ai to the stage (along with symbol definitions). As the library keeps getting bigger, this gets more problematic, with multiple definitions floating around with the same name (sometimes giving me errors in AS3).

I thought that being able to export an .SWC from Illustrator could work (carrying my "stage" and relative symbols), but I can only seem to export .SWF, and that is not importing into Flash so well.

Now I'm at the point where I guess I am going to make proxy projects in Flash that handle Illustrator/PS assets, and then export these as SWC. Then my core project will only have to link up with a few asset libraries.

Do RuntimeSharedAssets help with this sort of workflow? (They seem to be more dynamic than what I am looking for, but I really dunno).

I do most of my animation from AS3, so keeping the latest vectors/bitmaps available with predefined identifiers is my biggest hurdle between Design<-->Develop.

Thanks

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Short summary for : treat Flash/Animate as the canonical asset compiler and use a single designer-maintained FLA (assets.fla) that you export as a SWC. Designers import AI/PSD into that FLA (use File → Import → Import to Library), give each symbol a stable linkage/class name (prefer a namespaced pattern like com.myteam.assets.MySymbol), then publish an SWC from that FLA and add the SWC to your main project's library/classpath. This keeps instance/class identifiers stable for AS3 and avoids ad-hoc duplicates in the main FLA. (See how to publish SWC and configure ActionScript library paths.)
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How to update cleanly and avoid collisions: re-export the SWC from the single asset FLA whenever artwork changes; remove or replace the old SWC in the main project rather than repeatedly importing AI into the main FLA. Keep linkage identifiers unique (fully qualified package names) so two SWCs can’t accidentally define the same class/symbol. Runtime Shared Libraries (RSLs) / runtime-shared assets are a different use case — they load assets at runtime and add cross-app caching complexity; for small/medium projects the SWC-at-compile-time route is simpler.

Automate the transform from Illustrator to SWC: use JSFL commands to import AI/SVG into your assets FLA, assign linkage, and export the SWC as a build step (document.importFile() and related JSFL APIs). That removes manual delete/import cycles, enforces consistent names, and makes updates repeatable. Test exported SWCs in an isolated FLA to confirm linkage names and symbol IDs before swapping them into the main project.

Quick checklist

  • Keep one assets.fla as source-of-truth and version it (uncompressed XFL helps with VCS).
  • Import to Library, set Linkage → Export for ActionScript with unique package/class names.
  • Export SWC from assets.fla; add to main project's Library Path (choose merged/external appropriately).
  • Automate with JSFL; use RSLs only when you need runtime sharing/caching across multiple published SWFs.
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