Flash Scroll Engine: Super Tiles (Page 2)
This is based on Strille's tile based tutorial.
The previous part ended with the following question: How large can a map get when using Super Tiles? Actually I don't know, but here you can see a demo of the largest one I made before I decided it was more than enough for my purposes.
I don't think there will be any noticeable performance penalty if I make the map two or three times bigger. That's a really big map. As I mentioned earlier, it is more likely to notice lag when there are too many tiles drawn at the same time. That's all. Keeping this in mind, the scrolling of the map seems to perform smoothly independently of its size.
This map was laid out only with four super tiles. As a consequence the map does not look as detailed as the one on the previous page, which had around thirty different super tiles. There's nothing that says you should use only a few large super tiles, but for quick prototypes during development, you can afford to work with a less detailed look.
Overall, this practically solves the problem of large maps. Everything else is up to the author.