Hey readers - I want to apologize to anyone who tried to get to my last post and got a bunch of spam for cheap foreign pharmaceuticals instead. That certainly wasn't my intention (when I sell out, it won't be for gasex pills) and I'm taking steps to guard against this sort of thing in the future. If you want specifics on the hack, the best thread I've seen so far is here.

Sincerely,
-Rob

Now the good news; My new host runs entirely on wind power and my out of pocket expense is a quarter of what I used to pay. Huzzah!

The point where 8-bit graphics break down is when it comes time to interpolate a gradient. If you want to draw a smooth fade from black to 10% grey, you want as many colors in-between as there are pixels. In an 8-bit environment, you’ve only got about 26 shades of grey to work with so anything bigger than 26 pixels across is going to have blocks of pixels, all colored the same – in the biz, this is called “banding.”

Interestingly, while Flash is bound to 8-bit it will still import a 16-bit Tiff. When I realized this I figured there must be some trickery going on - either I could use 16-bit color in Flash or else the Tiff was getting the chop. Unfortunately, it turns out Flash downsamples the image into it's own color profile, but the importer is good enough to give us the courtesy of a good dithering first (provided you enabled it in Photoshop). Here’s a little demo to show the dithering - if you squint you can see the banding on the originals.

Edit: Per Ben’s comment, I’ve tweaked the colors below to make the banding a little more noticeable (if you still see flat-black bars, try cranking up your monitor’s brightness/contrast). For all the headaches I’ve had from gradients in the past, making a bad one is really hard to reproduce on command!

Maze pathfinder [1mb]

Failing the hit test.
The angles have been bugging me for a little while but my real brick wall right now is the hitTest method. My hope was to let characters roam around of their own accord and just worry about whether anyone was on a tile in any given situation. All of these assumptions hinged on the use of the hitTest method. I’ve put a dot on the stage that I'm using to test and it should be giving me a ‘hit’ only for the square it’s over. What I’m actually getting is a positive hit on the tile the dot is overlapping as well as any tile that shares a border with that one. In the screenshot below, all the white tiles are reporting hits...

IsoGrid
Take grid dimensions (width, height)
Generate IsoBlocks
Place blocks

IsoBlock
Take block dimensions (width, height, depth(?))
Draw fill
Draw stroke
Know it’s own position (x,y)
Set mouseOver effects

Stumbling blocks already…

To prevent later aggrevation, I’ll say that the northwest face on each block is the ‘top’, and the northeast face will be ‘right.’ With that in mind, I can say that an IsoGrid(50, 100) would generate 50 blocks to the northeast, and 100 blocks to the southeast of the initial block.

Additionally, since it’s a little odd to have each block’s origin at the top-left of the movieClip, I’ll modify my drawing method so I can keep the origin at the center of each block.