Gaming Your Way

I've started work on game 2 for game'88, and it's going to be a tile based scroller. Unbelievably after doing literally dozens of tile based games in as2, I've still not done one in as3.

First up I fired up Mappy, did some an ultra simple test map and then exported it using the lua based exporter I wrote way back. It's a nice simple format, eg

smf!|10|200|0,0|0,0|0,0|0,0|

We've got a bit of a header there, "Stimunation Map Format", now that's going back some years, the width and height of the map ( 10 tiles wide, 200 high ), and then a combination of the tile image|tile attribute.

In the good old days we'd just #include that and hit it up that way, but as3 doesn't give us include, so it's a swanky new byteArray approach for us.

As always reading code on a blog is just boring, so open up another tab and get some filth in there to flick over to when your eyes start to glaze, or maybe a youTube video of a cute cat.

package Classes.Game2.Scroller {
    import flash.utils.ByteArray;
    
    public class G2_LevelData {

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Assets
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        [Embed("/_assets/G2_level1.txt",mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
        private var level1Data:Class;
        
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Properties
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        public var map1:Array;

        private var mapData:ByteArray;
                
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Constructor
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        public function G2_LevelData() {
            mapData=new level1Data();
            var mapDataArray:Array=convertToArray(mapData);
        }

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Private
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        private function convertToArray(source:ByteArray):Array{
            var tempString:String=source.toString();
            var tempArray:Array=tempString.split("|");
            return tempArray;        
        }
        
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    }
}

And that's it, almost too simple to share, but if it saves you a bit of hunting further down the line then it's not a bad thing.

Squize.