This post will mostly only be interesting for Flash coders and game developers

I have spent the past several days working out various functional specifications and data models for the Flash Adventure Game. So far, I have rudimentary versions of the following:

-XML heirarchies
-Tile placement engine
-dynamic bitmap object masking

I am particularly proud of the object masking idea.

My ultimate goal to create a game (engine) which can be modified without the requiring that the user in question have access to Flash. All that should be needed is a graphics program which can pump out .jpg files, a text editor with which to produce XML, and (maybe) an FTP program to place files on a website.

The dynamic masking is the key. It compensates for Flash being unable to dynamically load .gif or .png files; these formats support alpha transparency. .jpgs, which can be dynamically loaded, do not support transparency. But they can (using the Flash Drawing API) be masked. All I need to do is feed in the appropriate coordinates (in XML; not unlike creating an image map), and skaboom, I have one highly detailed, appropriately transparent sprite!

A lot of this reminds me of the hundreds of hours I spent back in the 80s writing games on the Commodore 64. Back then, there were no graphics applications so we had to program our images in hexadecimal. And the images, egregious hacks aside, were all 24×24, and one color. Or 12×24 and three colors, but all of the colored images had to share one of the colors.

In other words, this is a real walk down memory lane.

As I have useful information I will post it in an open directory. I will post some code after it is debugged. As always, suggestions are welcome .