Some assets, especially JSON and XML files, can take up quite a lot of disk space. That can increase the install size of an app or game significantly.

Fortunately, though, many of those assets also compress very well when zipped – let's exploit that! With this extension, you can compress individual assets as zip-files and let them be decompressed by the AssetManager.

First, use a ZIP-tool of your choice to compress the relevant assets. Each zip file must contain one (and only one!) asset. The file name of the zip file is actually not relevant – the AssetManager will only look at the filename found inside the zip-file. Nevertheless, I recommend the following name scheme so that you easily see what's inside:

  data.json => data.json.zip
  font.xml => font.xml.zip

To “install” this extension in your game, simply download the ZipLoader class from the Gist-link above and copy it to your game project. Furthermore, you need a copy of the FZip library. Download the swc library from here and add it to your project, as well.

Using the class is really easy: you simply assign a new ZipLoader instance to the AssetManager's dataLoader property and, bam, it will unzip files automatically and transparently!

// instantiate the standard AssetManager
var assets:AssetManager = new AssetManager();
 
// assign the "ZipLoader"
assets.dataLoader = new ZipLoader();

When that's done, you use your AssetManager just like before, both for zipped and unzipped files.

assets.enqueue(appDir.resolvePath("assets/font.png"));
assets.enqueue(appDir.resolvePath("assets/font.xml.zip"));
assets.loadQueue(onComplete);

Happy zipping!

• 2018/04/18: First public version.
• 2018/06/04: Moved all the code into the DataLoader extension.

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Feel free to edit this part of the page if you want to add information that's lacking in the above description.
Questions are better asked in the forum, though.