I’ve been developing Flash games for many years, since Flash 5, and one area that has always been very frustrating for me has been debugging when the game is running inside the browser (OK, Action Script 1 was a nightmare.) A text field on the stage and some support code to feed it trace statements has worked while there were no other options.
function myTrace(msg) {
trace(msg);
txt_debug.text = msg;
}
Then there was the ability to install a debug Flash player and set up mm.cfg to send trace statements out to a file.
There is another way that seems even better. There is a menu item in the Flash IDE on the Debug menu called Begin Remote Debug Session. You must run the debug Flash player. You have trace() statements in your code, and if you are a seasoned programmer you abstracted them into a class with programmatic control (if (_DEBUGGING) { trace(msg); } etc.). Now your trace statements from the .swf running in your browser are showing in the Output window of your Flash IDE. No config files, no searching your hard drive for that trace output file, no more text field hacks. This is pretty good, and it’s about time.
