This week, I got all the characters imported and working correctly. Each DAE is only about 100 Kb so they’re pretty small, even with animations. I’m still working on making the down button enable them to turn around and walk in the oppisite direction. Right now, if you hold down they basically seizure a bit until you let go.
I also created a castle, cactus, and tree inside maya then exported them as collada files and brought them into flash. I was surpised to find that they were about half the size of the character animations. I really thought they would be much smaller, like a fourth of the size. I guess the animations on the character collada have less affect on size than I previously thought.
Here is the new cube example that I created.
Finally, I started doing research on the collision tests. It looks like this may be fairly difficult. I found several options. Right now, sphere collisions looks like the most feasible but there are some nice collision tests available with the WOW physics engine that is capable of working with papervision. This is really the last major functionality item that I have to get working before the game level can actually start to be built.