BulkLoader – managing multiple loadings in AS3

One of the most common tasks in game development is the assets loading process. You have two options: 1) ship your game as a single 45Mb SWF file filled with sweet and compressed-to-the-bones images/sounds or 2) load all those assets separately and on demand.

Sometimes the first option is your best shot, but for casual online games the second one is more suitable. Multiple loadings in AS3 can be a pain, because there are several file types to load (wave, JPG, mp3, GIF, swf, etc) and there is no single way to load them all.

So far my best approach to solve this problem is called BulkLoader, a library for managing multiple loadings with AS3. It is licensed under the MIT License and has amazing features:

Design goals:

BulkLoader gracefully handles progress notification in these use cases:

One of the things I like the most is that this project was created by a Brazilian fellow named Arthur Debert :). Thanks for this great tool!