Hi there, New to the community and hoping to learn a lot from here.

I'm currently working on a little side project with a friend. The game is a very simple tactics game that uses external .PNG for sprites. We're using an XML to call out those files as to reduce noodling in flash to add new elements.

I'm wondering if this method slows down flash games as opposed to importing the files directly into the project.

Also I'm looking into doing the same for animated sprites, lets say a character walk cycle (6frames) saved off into 6 separate PNG files. Or is there a better way to do this?

Ive seen people post sprite sheets that contain all character animations, is it possible to use such a sheet within flash? Example: 6 frames each 10x10px so the sheet is 60x10px. When a walk is initiated, it cycles through the sheet for that action.

Basically I'm hoping to create a system or a game engine where adding new animations is very modular and controlled externally through XML files.

Any thoughts?