Buster Drake in the one with the conversion to Actionscript 3

Flash is doing my head in right now. >_< Everytime I think I'm making progress I come up against something else which stops me in my tracks. It's like I'm learning everything I know from scratch again. In general, though, I am getting somewhere - hopefully I'll have something to show once I've gotten over this hurdle. The problem is I decided to listen to what everyone's been telling me and learn Actionscript 3 instead of Actionscript 2 - the tipping point was discovering that AS3 supports a BitmapData class, which is basically just a mechanism for low level blitting - *if* I can get it working I won't have to worry about messing with MovieClips and what not and can just go ahead implementing things the way I'm used to. Apparently it's also faster than the usual "flash" way of doing things, so it's win-win. But I'm trying to make an array of tiles and it's crashing when I try to access it and I don't know why, so I'm calling it quits for tonight. Will try again tomorrow. I've also switched from the trial version of Flash CS3 to FlashDevelop and Flex, a free alternative. That was actually totally painless! Good to know that I can develop flash apps without having to shell out $700 USD for the official tools! As for the game, I've decided to redo things a little - I wasn't totally happy with the Mode-X way I was displaying the game, so I've switched to a text mode font, which feels a lot more "Authentic". I'm still cheating with vertical space, but I doubt anyone will care - technically textmode is a 640x300 pixel screen stretched out, which looks kinda weird on normal screen resolutions, so I'm just using 640x480 with the same "tile" size (the 8x12 pixel font). This gives me a screensize increase from 40x30 in the AS2 version in the prototype, to 80x40 in this version! It looks pretty different, as you can imagine, but I think it'll actually suit the game a lot better. On a side note, the IGF deadline's just passed. So that's kinda depressing too. 😥