Comments on: SWF Timeline Reconstruction with as3swf

By: Claus Wahlers

Claus Wahlers — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:10:58 +0000

Hi Jeroen,

to get the offsets (or, to be exact, the transformation matrix – characters can be positioned, rotated and scaled), you have to scan the SWF for PlaceObject tags, which contain this info. The DefineShape tags, which have the export functionality built in, only contain the raw shape, without any info on where that particular shape is actually placed on the display list.

If you have a very simple SWF, that only contains one frame with three shapes, it is sufficient to just scan for PlaceObject tags, check for the characterId, and grab the matrix.

This is, simplified, the structure you would find:
DefineShape id 1
DefineShape id 2
DefineShape id 3
PlaceObject characterId 1, depth 1, matrix
PlaceObject characterId 2, depth 2, matrix
PlaceObject characterId 3, depth 3, matrix

However, SWF can get very complex, shapes and other assets can be placed multiple times, and there are tweens, nested movieclips etc etc, so there’s a lot more to consider.

HTH,
Claus.

PS: Thanks for the Wiki edit!

By: Jeroen Keppens

Jeroen Keppens — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:00:58 +0000

PS: I modified the script in the Objective-C page with fixes I did to make it work.

By: Jeroen Keppens

Jeroen Keppens — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:58:44 +0000

Hi,

I’m not a flash/flex developer, so I might be missing a few things. I managed to download and install flash builder and create a small program to export an SWF file to obj-c files. So far so good.

The SWF file was an export from a Adobe Illustrator image. It contained 3 symbols: a square, a circle and a star. The SWF looked exactly like the AI. I got 3 UIView classes. I used these inside a test ios app and got to display the shapes. First a single shape, then the 3 shapes. Still: so far so good…

But there was a small issue: the 3 different shapes are all in the corner instead of the position they were originally placed. In some way it makes sense, but it’s a bit annoying.

I wonder if there is a way to get the original “offsets” from the swf using your library.

Or am I doing something wrong in the export that I end up with 3 different symbols anyway.

Thanks for the advice and for the great tool!

By: Nid

Nid — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:29:14 +0000

Hi Master,
Could you please add a example how to create a swf file with some timeline animation from scratch using as3swf API , this will be so great to start a web based Flash IDE

By: Lee Probert

Lee Probert — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:22:34 +0000

I’m so glad you’re still looking into this Claus.

By: Fotios

Fotios — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:43:52 +0000

Claus, not a problem. Like I said, I’m working on translating some flash files into Objective C graphics-code for the iphone and your library has been extremely useful.
Also, I found out that some swf’s I’m converting don’t include the “TagDefineShape” tag, so the code breaks. Please let me know if I can help in any way to improve the library. It looks like I have to adapt the Objective-C conversion code for my needs. THANKS so much for your quick reply!

By: Claus Wahlers

Claus Wahlers — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:53:42 +0000

Fotios, thanks for pointing that out. Apparently i made some changes to the API after writing that article and didn’t find the time yet to get back to testing and updating the Obj-C exporter stuff, sorry about that. I’m gonna fix it the coming weekend, latest.

By: Fotios

Fotios — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:28:46 +0000

I just started using your library for the iphone and I’d like to contribute to it. I use Flash CS4 (exporting for adobe air 1.5), and iphone simulator 3.0. It looks like the Objective-C example has some typos/bugs (http://wiki.github.com/claus/as3swf/shape-export-to-objective-c):

line 37: Instead of defineShape.shapeId should be :defineShape.characterId
line 48: docHandler is not a global variable.

I fixed the above compiler issues, and wrote a test Objective C program for the iphone, but the colors of the swf I have are not shown. Do you know what is going wrong?

Thanks!

By: jpauclair

jpauclair — Sun, 09 May 2010 02:12:55 +0000

This is so great!
In the past few weeks I analysed a lot how flash IDE is managing timeline animation.
This will help me a lot continue thoses research.

With this information you can predict memory usage and do datamining in batch process of a list of assets. This is huge.

Thanks Claus!