[CS3] Newbie code structure

[ChaseNYC]

Hi, I'm currently working on a game that basically goes from like moving around on a tile based map to then walking into a building then a separate menu comes up and the map disappears. A good example of something similar to what I'm doing is an old game bard's tale for NES. You can see in the pictures below:



and then on the tile map they run into fight, the map goes away and a battle starts:



basically this project I'm working on is larger than my skill base which I know immediately gets a bad reaction around here but anyways this is how I like to learn. I'm just curious how to go about structuring code to fit this type of model. I've been working hard on making a tile-based world that fits my needs, I've created a simple editor as well and now I'm curious how when say they enter a door or come to a random fight, whats the best way of temporarily pausing the map and hiding it and calling the fight part of the game, which I haven't started yet.

I guess a second question is with a game that requires an section for fights and an section for walking around the main map, do you think its better to write each separately then code them to work with each other, or do you think its best to just work with all the code at once?

Thanks in advance for any insight/help you can give,

ChaseNYC

[ImprisonedPride]

I'm doing something similar and I've found it to save me a tremendous amount of work to use OOB with inheritance classes... With it you can easily add transitions and functions to "disable" the main movie while something else is going on... like a fight.

[renderhjs]

whats the best way of temporarily pausing the map and hiding it and calling the fight part of the game, which I haven't started yet. 

put the tiles in a movieCLip container wich is on the main stage,- as well as another movieClip holding the figt screen graphics.
Then you can do whatever neat swapping transition you want, the simplest would be setting one of those 2 movieClips _visible to true and the other one to false.

I guess a second question is with a game that requires an section for fights and an section for walking around the main map, do you think its better to write each separately then code them to work with each other, or do you think its best to just work with all the code at once? 

try getting used to OOP like classes, objects ect.,
Create just 1 flash movie but different Objects or Classes that hold functions for either part. That way you dont get mixed up with similar variable names ect.

[Never_land:(]

"the simplest would be setting one of those 2 movieClips _visible to true and the other one to false."
That's a bit slow for the flashplayer, I'd say you store the position of all objects and vars, then jump to the fight scene.

[ChaseNYC]

So I thought I could figure this out on my own by reading up on OOP Inheritance stuff but it seems a little bit more confusing than I expected. I was wondering if someone has a good example of how I would do what IP was talking about via some dummy code or something? Or would it be best for me to post a abridged version of the current structure of my code?

[renderhjs]

you wrote CS3 does that automaticly mean you code in AS3,- or is it still AS1/2?

[ChaseNYC]

uhmmm yeah I think I was already using OOP and just didn't know that's what it was called. The only thing I had to change about my code was instead of using addChild to root I'm addChild'ing to empty movieClips on the the stage. I guess this is resolved... sorry and thanks. But yes just to answer your question I am coding in AS3.