Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #1: Tile Maps, XML, and bitmapData

One of the most useful advances in Flash 8 and CS3 for game developers has been the use of raw bitmap data to render on screen images. The CS3 / AS3 implementation has been changed from AS2, so this tutorial will go through the basics of creating, loading, and displaying a screen of bitmap data. We will first create a unique set of image tiles and export those tiles as a PNG file. Next we will load those tiles into a map creation tool (Mappy) and use them to create a screen for a Pacman style game. We will use a custom Mappy (.lua) script I wrote, especially for this tutorial, to export the screen data as XML. When we finally get to Flash, well write a class that loads the PNG tiles, loads the XML map data, and displays a bitmapData representation of the screen we create.

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