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Director Article

 

Tile-Based Scrolling in Director


Nonoche

Nonoche

www.nonoche.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Advantages of Tile-Based Scrolling
  3. Challenges of Tile-Based Scrolling
  4. Applications of Tile-Based Scrolling
  5. Practical Applications of Tile-Based Scrolling in Director
Created:
10 October 2005
User Level:
Intermediate

Tile-based scrolling has been used for ages by the video games industry, yet it's only been available in Director since version 8. This technique offers a lot of advantages, and applies particularly well to Shockwave because it allows for minimal loading time.

This technique consists of breaking down a bitmap into graphical micro-items and then into a map of the graphic, as shown in Figure 1. Here you can break down the image into three little bitmap files and a correspondence table.

Tile-based scrolling

Figure 1. Tile-based scrolling breaking down a bitmap into graphical micro-items and then into a map of the graphic

In this article I review the advantages, challenges, and applications of tile-based scrolling.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software:

Director MX 2004

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About the author

Nonoche is a professional Shockwave game developer. In 1987, at age 13, he started his long relationship with Director—then called MacroMind VideoWorks II. He started his career in 1995 as a multimedia developer. When Macromedia released Shockwave, he began to share his works—such as the first 3D engine ever written entirely in Lingo—and eventually got noticed by the company. Nonoche enlisted in the Director 8 beta program and wrote the first online side-scrolling platform game using Imaging Lingo. During the Director 8.5 beta cycle, he wrote Frenzyrinth, one of the first fully fledged 3D games made with Director, and won a Macromedia development contest with it. As Shockwave became the best solution for online games, which he had been looking forward to since the very beginning, Nonoche started writing web games exclusively in 2000—and has never looked back.