The Shining Source

Another thread about flash.  Anyway I have an idea for something which involves merging shining look and feel with another games quest system.  This will be purely about the programming side of things.

Tiles.
Looking around I find very little in the way of good tutorials on tile systems in flash AS3.  There is a fair bit in AS2, and good notes on game creation with tile systems from Tony Pa.  So it looks like I'm starting from scratch, which to be honest is the best way with me.

The concept is pretty simple, I will design the tiles, make an xml file to hold the map data as to which tile goes where, load the tiles into flash, load the xml into an array, and then use the array to plot the correct tiles into the correct place.  At this stage I'm not worrying about map editors or tile editors since the map isn't really that complex(30x30 tiles).

My other consideration is that I need to zoom in and out on the map as a player.
I'd like to give the player decent camera controls with the mouse and this will come into play here - but the zooming has initially got me confused.
Normally I'd make the objects scale as the person thinks they are zooming - and at this point this is what I'm going for.  Something in the back of my mind is screaming at me though.

So I haven't written any more code on this, specifically because I'm marinating on this problem.  Where's Job when you need him

Evl, I was wondering if Flash code is portable between versions or whether you have to rewrite it whenever a new version pops in .

OK sweet, I think I can manage to answer that(it's complicated!)
Actionscript is the coding language used in flash.  It's now at version 3.0

Actionscript 2 accepted actionscript 1 commands and variables, but actionscript 3 has it's own.
Actionscript 3 is basically java with different keywords - and prebuilt functions for graphics and data handling.

So no, it's not interchangeable between 2 and 3.  However in any new version of flash, you can actually save the file as actionscript 2(so you don't need to worry if you are moving old code into a new version for some reason).  New flash viewers can view either, so no updating is actually necessary.

Actionscript 3 is much much better than 2 though so if you want to make something it's best to use that.  1 and 2 were built around movies, while 3 is able to do anything without having to use workarounds.