The first pieces of code are online

OK, the first scripts are online! It's still a bit of a mess and in need of a good tidy. I'll get round to that in the next couple of days.

I've come across a couple of interesting issues already. The code has been tested in the Flash CS3 IDE and with Powerflasher FDT plugin for Eclipse, and shocking, the Flash IDE's compile and run performance is far greater. I don't know if my FDT configuration is correct, so I'll have to look in to that before I go any further. Running the .swf got really slow when I used the 80Mb CD data files. Which brings up the point of performance when playing these games online. But that's an issue for another post.

I was correct about the sandbox issues.

In the book Essential Actionscript 3, Moock (2007, p. 428) states:

"...Flash's authoring tool's Test Movie-mode Player automatically trusts all local-realm .swf files it opens or loads."

It appears this stretches to ALL local-realm files. So, the Flash IDE ignores security violations while in the development environment, while FDT forces you to deal with the issue from the start. To do this in FDT, manually set -use-network=false in the compiler arguments. This will allow you to test offline without security warnings.

The next step will be to tidy everything up a little and creating some of the methods I'll need to deal with binary files. Flash doesn't much like dealing with 16 bit and 24 bit numbers. Hopefully the Actionscript ByteArray won't be a hindrance and bit-shifting will be easy enough.