In case some readers don’t know, PushButton Engine is a component based game engine for Flash/ActionScript3.
I am using it for my rapid prototyping tool (current working title “LevelMaster2000″). With this post, I’d like to wrap up how I got my development environment setup.
Basically, there are three options when coding ActionScript (I am not counting FlashCS3/4 as an option!)
- use Adobe FlexBuilder3 / nowadays FlashBuilder4
- use FDT
- use FlashDevelop
Since FlashDevelop is free and open source and (seems) mature, I decided to go with it.
Installation was pretty straight forward, and there are good docs how to setup a project with PushButton Engine. I am also working with Flex SDK 3.4, haven’t yet tried version 4, but that might come later on.
As soon as you got your project running, you’ll probably miss the debugger (at least if you have some programming background 
). There’s also a solution to this: FlexDbg, a debug plugin for FlashDevelop. You can get it here (if that doesn’t work, try http://gforge.opensource-sw.net/gf/project/flexdbg). Just copy the files to your FlashDevelop/Plugins directory.
After restarting FlashDevelop, the debug-toolbar should be visible. You also get some windows (breakpoints, locals, stack) you might want to dock somewhere. If you navigate to Tools > Programm Settings > FlexDbg, you can set hotkeys for debugging, which is nice as always needing to press a button can be a bit annoying.
So, with this done, you’re setup for action!
A last remark: it seems that alternately using FlashDevelop’s “Test Movie” and FlexDbg’s “Start” confuses FlashDevelop so hard, that it won’t start the movie after all. Examining the TaskManager, a flash.exe starts up, but doesn’t show up. The solution is to kill the process, restart FlashDevelop and don’t use those two functions along. After all, you probably won’t need the standard “Test Movie” anymore anyway!
If somebody has a better solution to this problem, I’m happy to hear it and update my post.