Flash Bitmap automap

At the moment the amount of spare time I have is very low, and to make matters worse I am taking a drawing class. I am hoping that they will help me get my artwork up to a much better quality than it currently is. As with every other skill, the key is practice but knowing what you are doing wrong certainly helps.

I am still going to put an effort into getting my 10 hours of work on the site selected project, with any slippages of hours being rolled over to the next week's total. I did manage to finish a rough automap render but it only paints a test pattern as the map classes aren't developed yet because I decided that I wanted to make sure there would be something to post this Friday. This was done a bit different from the way I have normally handled such maps in Flash. Flash 9 has a Bitmap Data class which I am taking advantage of. Technically, this was introduced in Flash 8, but I am jumping from flash player 7 content to flash player 9.

The BitmapData class lets you use an image which is loaded with a separate loader class. I am not sure why you need a separate class that handles the loading of an external image, as it would make more sense to me to have this functionality part of the Bitmap or BitmapData class. Once copied into a BitmapData class, clips from the image can be easily copied to the bitmap used for the automap. This should be fairly fast as I believe the BitmspData class is able to use hardware acceleration, or at least native code for bitmap clipping.

At this point I have a test pattern being displayed, using the 16 tiles that the game uses. If I get around to finishing the map classes before Friday (assuming they can be done in less than 10 hours) I may have a proper map this friday, but if not I will at least be able to post the game running the test pattern.