[AS2] Tile game or not tile game?

[krolben]

Hi guys,
I'm about to start working on a space fighter game. I wanna make a clone of the 1989 Amiga game called Battle Squadron.

For those of you who don't know the game, here's a simple explanation:
You fly a spaceship and encounter all sorts of enemies that you have to shoot down, and you can pick up points and better weapons.
The scenery in the game is very comples and there are a lot of different enemies on the screen at the same time.

My problem is that I'm not sure about how to program the game engine. I've recently created a tile based platform game with AS 2 (without classes, since they slowed it even more down), which ran very slowly because of the many tiles that were moved in each frame, and I would like to avoid the same problem in this game, since it's probably a lot more tiles that will need to be moved here.

What can you recommend that I do to improve speed when building the game engine? How should the tiles be programmed? Is there an even better way to build the levels than with tiles?

By the way: I plan to code everything using OOP and AS 2.0.

[Crismo]

From your description it sounds like it would benefit more from a parallax approach then a tiled one.

[krolben]

That sounds interesting, but what's a parallax approach?
Do you know where I can read more about it?

[Crismo]

Gamedev.net and flipcode.com probably has some articles.
I know Flashkit has some tutorials (But they just call it scrolling).
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Games/Building-David_Do-610/index.php
A Google search for Parallax Scrolling should give you quit a lot.
And I haven't seen a single Flash game book that doesn't have a chapter covering the technique.

[krolben]

Ok, I'll check it out - thanx a lot for your help :)