The Flash Connection Make mine Actionscript 3.0!

   I know from experience that there's usually a reason, but I'm just trying ot do the "make a quiz" tutorial from actionscript.org and... it simply doesn't work. I'm not getting the output I told the quizapp.as file to trace.  The first time, I got the warning message about assigning a class, tho' the files are in the very same folder... 

   I guess I should be grateful that it doesn't work from the git-go...  oh... now I see... I figgered I'd go to the end and get the files and see if htey worked and yea, second comment talks about getting a bunch of errors.   Hmmm... there's a link that doesn't work. 

  Okay, another dead end.   I know that with the web, you often get what you pay for it... but I was hoping to be a happy donater, since when I buy stuff I often *don't* get what I pay for it... even the zip file doesn't seem to want to download. I"m thinking there are version conflicts... dratfooey.

Okay, I"m going back and forth here to try to see what I typed.  Thanks for replying! It would be nice to see the whole thread...

As I said in the opening of my comment, this is in response to the 'make a quiz' tutorial.

The tutorial is over at actionscript.org and that site doesn't let me comment (I suppose it will, all in good time, but even after registering, etc. things aren't showing up), and I figured posting to your website would be a more likely way to contact you.  I did a brief search for that same tutorial here, but all I found was what is apparently a follow-up one.  

I know it takes patience to find the little stuff (I'm a good touch typist, but SOmetimes my FIngers GO too FAst ;)) ... I've got a fair amount of that.  However, when that teensy weensy bit of code flunks the "are the two files talking?" test, it makes me reticent to proceed.  The reference to a dead end is that if, as that second comment after the original tutorial would indicate, it is common to get messes of error messages and... oh, the link to explain them doesn't even work... that since I want to learn how to do this, I should find another route, so that I don't look for errors that aren't mine.   Since cutting and pasting the code from the tutorial doesn't yield any better results (tho' other assorted tests along the way did work once I FOund the {assorted} little typos), I suspect the problem is some fundamental noob booboo in spelling QuizApp or getting the buttons into the library or something... (I *do* keep typing QuizQpp...) but the tutorial is from 2008 so there might be version issues, too. 

Again, thanks for your time.  There's an awful lot of positive feedback -- which is especially impressive at the beginner level.

What a fantastic game Jody,

I will try to modify it to play on my mobile phone and get my son involved in creating the player and enemies. 

Thank you again for letting me know about your newest tutorial and for helping me with my confused modification via email!

I really appreciate the time you spend writing these tutorials and encourage you to continue your brilliant work.

Best wishes,

Ben.

Ness,

Sorry for the delay in answering this, but this involved getting back into the project, and I don't always have that kind of time.

Yeah, you can add whatever kind of (death) animation you want to the Spider movie clip, then use gotoAndPlay(2) to make it play when the spider is hit. This works, but the problem is that the recycleEnemy function kicks in right away, and moves the enemy to the top of the screen again. The animation no doubt plays, but the user can never see it happen.

So there needs to be a way to delay recycling the enemy until after its animation plays. I accomplished this by putting a line of code on the last frame of the Spider symbol:

dispatchEvent(new Event("done"));

Then I make the main timeline listen for this event as soon as a bullet hits an enemy. I added these lines in the enemiesHitTest function, somewhere around line 133:
spiderArray[i].gotoAndPlay(2);
spiderArray[i].addEventListener("done", spider_onDone);

Then I wrote a spider_onDone handler function, and moved the line that recycles the enemy to the inside of this function. Inside the function, by the way, I can no longer refer to the enemy spider as spiderArray[i] (because I'm not in the function containing that loop anymore), but fortunately I can get a reference to whatever enemy it was using event.currentTarget:

function spider_onDone(event:Event):void {
var spider:MovieClip = event.currentTarget as MovieClip;
recycleEnemy(spider);
}

I found that this all works well, but depending on how long your destruction animation runs, it can cause a couple of other problems. If the enemy is still sitting there, he can possibly be hit again by a second bullet. Also, the player might be in danger of being hit (unfairly) by the spider's destruction animation. I solved both of these situations by creating a dynamic property called wasHit. You can create dynamic properties on MovieClip instances by just using them as though they were already there. So when an enemy is hit, I set its wasHit property to true. Then I created a test for wasHit when the loop first begins. If the enemy was already hit, then bailing out of the loop will prevent it from being hit tested further. Then the wasHit variable is reset to false again in the event handler.

This way no matter how long your death animation or how large the graphical content of it is, it can't hurt the player and it will be impervious to all but the first bullet.

I can pass along this new version to you, if you write to me at mazoonist at gmail dot com (or just use my site's contact form).

Jody

Paul,

You might create a series of separate MovieClips (one for each of those things you mentioned, like "move right," "move left", etc, and each one being an animation), then create one master MovieClip that has an instance of each of those on its frames. Label the frames. then just use something like gotoAndStop("walkRight") when you get a right arrow keypress. The master movie clip will goto and stop on that frame, but note--that frame contains a sub-MovieClip with an animation that will play continually. This approach seems better to me than managing a bunch of "looping sections" in the master clip.

I didn't have a walk animation on hand to experiment with (shame on me!), or I might have tried to put something together for you. I would love to see what you've done, if you'd care to send it to me at mazoonist at gmail dot com.

Jody