Learn Haxe

Dynamically Adding and Reloading Assets in Haxeflixel

Posted on 2016-01-20

Tagged with: HaxeFlixel

Yes, you can dynamically load (and reload) assets at runtime in your HaxeFlixel project, courtesy of OpenFL. (Caveat: I tried all this on Neko, although it should work equally on any platform.)

• First, run your project via lime test neko
• Second, add (or modify) your assets to the assets directory.
• Finally, run lime update neko. This copies and re-bundles the assets, in a way that the running process can access them.

Internal Details

When you run your lime project, it actually creates a copies of the assets directory in export/<os name>/neko/bin. Interestingly, copying your asset files here isn't enough; you still need to run lime update neko to make them accessible to the running game.

Also, when the assets reload, they become available to calls like getBitmapData et all. These calls are already (currently) used by HaxeFlixel, so you don't need to do anything more to load them.

You can see how easy it is to reload assets for a live project, while debugging! I'm sure there are many, many creative possibilities for this (like creating an interactive game editor ...)