Characters
I was wondering if John was doing a step by step on characters? if not: What is the best size character for a 800x600 game how much animation could you have in the _char.swf before it seriously impacts the game? allthough the animation in 2da's char was very simple, and only had 1-5 views he still ended up over 1.3 meg.. i think he was about 290 pixels in hieght and not many colours

Well, one easy solution is to make characters in vector. Smaller file size, infinitely scalable. As for performance, it really doesn't matter what the file size of the sprite is. Once Flash has downloaded the SWF, it has it cached... at which time, the performance factor comes down to re-draw area. Flash has to redraw the bounding box of the character each frame. The bounding box changes with the character's scale within the room. So, often times (whether you realize it or not), you're gaining frame rate when the character is scaled smaller since there is less screen area to redraw each frame. That answer was undoubtedly long-winded. I hope it at least answered your question ;-)

Thanks Greg i just get the feeling it was the character that was causing the heavy bandwidth with problems in 2DA so yes i'm trying vectors, and hitting tutorials to get my characters better and not poser

You weren't using PNG for the frame sequence, were you? Those are monstrous in file size since you've got a whole additional 8-bit channel of data for each image. If you want to keep using bitmaps, render the frames as compressed JPGs then drop a vector mask on each one. Really nice balance between visuals, transparency, and file size... though tracing each mask is kind of a pain. Generally worth the work though!

yeah they where PNG, direct from Poser.. i've got a feeling maybe tucker has done the same? Poser isn't going to work with my planned project, so its going to be hand drawn characters, i'm not having much success right now with computer drawing but the story is coming along nicely.. i'll post something soon for comments and suggestions :wink:

Hear hear! I'm curious.