Packaging my Hierarchical State Machine implementation for AS 3.0

It has been a long time in coming, but I am finally getting ready to release our alpha version of our hierarchical state machine for Flash ActionScript 3.0!

I will be writing blog entries over the next few weeks as I document my path to release.  It hasn’t been hard to organize things, but I’ve certainly benefitted from finding blog posts about installing or doing this or that.

To begin the process, I created a Google Code project here.  I had to choose a version control system for the code, so I chose Git.  I was using Tortoise SVN for other projects, but I have heard good things about Git, and the idea of allowing others to fork projects without creating a whole new project was really intriguing to me.  I have only had mild encounters with Flex, but I certainly believe that one of the great values in making a state machine implementation is going to be integrating the engine into Flex.  However, I’m not the guy to do it well.  Therefore, I’m trying to appeal to others who are more familiar to create a Flex fork, perhaps, or maybe haXe, and allow these other projects to influence where I might go with the AS3 implementation.  The wonderful thing about not understanding all of this is that I am not limited to what the things actually do, only what I believe they should do !

I have been developing the AS3 code in FlashDevelop, which is wonderful (needless to say).  While of course I have Flash CS4, on my kick-ass iCore 7 Vista machine, the ActionScript editor inside Flash becomes painfully slow with only 1 or 2 pages of code, especially when I start typing things inside quotation marks.  I’m now cleaning up the comments and generating the documentation via ASDoc.  FlashDevelop has a command to initiate ASDoc, you just have to provide a few key pieces of information.  For example, for AS 3, FlashDevelop requires you to specify where asdoc.exe resides.  I have Flex Builder and the Flex SDK, so it was simple to navigate over to the sdk/ folder, find the latest version (3.3), and point to it inside the bin/ folder.

The Adobe Flex docs are pretty good for helping to understand the tags for ASDoc.