Comments on: Handling Basic Animation with a Divided Timeline

By: Michael Williams

Michael Williams — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:43:31 +0000

Hey Joe,

If you want to avoid writing code directly into the FLA file (i.e. on the timeline) you can use State MovieClips. That’d give you an easy way to bundle up all your layers into a single simple object as well.

Let me know how you get on with that

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:27:01 +0000

What if my Avatar is a character with a walkcycle of several layers and frames packaged into a MovieClip. How can I get him to play only on keyPresses? I have done it by writing code directly into the fla. file when I gave it an instance name, but I can’t figure out how to do it in classes.

By: Wesley: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial

Wesley: A Game Based on the AS3 Tutorial — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:45:39 +0000

[...] was really cool. Bram added in the walk-cycles and cola-throwing before I’d even written the animation and shoot-’em-up [...]

By: Michael Williams

Michael Williams — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:54:49 +0000

No problem The silly mistakes are often the hardest to spot, and the most annoying to find.

By: grey

grey — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:53:30 +0000

Once again I’ve made a silly little mistake. Thanks for the easy fix. One of these days I’ll make a non-typo mistake. thanks again. Good catch.

By: Michael Williams

Michael Williams — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:23:32 +0000

Hey Grey.

Where exactly are you calling it from at the minute? I know you said “when the enemy was created” but if you could provide a snippet of the surrounding code that’d be great.

If it’s somewhere here:

    var newEnemy:Enemy = new Enemy( randomX, -15 );
    army.push( newEnemy );
    addChild( newEnemy );

…then I think it’s just a simple typo — you have written enemy.gotoAndPlay() when it should be newEnemy.gotoAndPlay(). But that’s just a guess

By: Grey

Grey — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:47:49 +0000

Alright, I messed up again. I'm trying to make the random enemies have a different animation decided randomly. I coded something like this, but I can't seem to figure out where or how to call this function properly. It may even be in my naming. Any ideas. Here is my snippet of code

var randomAnimate = Math.floor(Math.random()*4);
                    if (randomAnimate == 1)
                    {
                        enemy.gotoAndPlay("ClockwiseCoal");
                    }
                    else 
                    {
                        enemy.gotoAndPlay("CounterClockwiseCoal");
                    }

I plan to have 3 animations, but I haven't done them because I wanted to get it working first. I tried to call a function when the enemy was created, but I kept getting "TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. at AvoiderGame/onTick() at flash.utils::Timer/_timerDispatch() at flash.utils::Timer/tick()"

By: Michael Williams

Michael Williams — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:20:30 +0000

Nice one Kevin. Hey, you could use the rotation to affect the animation too, so an enemy walking upwards would only show the back of his head.

Oh, WordPress comments seem to do that with code, it's really irritating. To create your own code box you just use "pre" tags:

 before the code and

after it.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:45:37 +0000

yuck, sorry the code is hard to read, intresting that the last of it was put in a scrolling box.. hm… how would I “box” the code next time?

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:43:27 +0000

Your missing something... Enemy animation change based on which direction he moves!, A little tricky... well until you play around with "current label". This is a small chunk of my game, to get you started, especially if anyone needs the enemies to switch animations. Although as always, there is a better way to do it.

if (enemy.base.hitTestObject(wall)) {
                        if (enemy.front.hitTestObject(wall)) {
                            enemy.x-= xVel;
                            enemy.y-= yVel;
                            enemy.lockTarget.width = 0;
                        }
                        if (enemy.currentLabel == "walk") {
                            enemy.gotoAndPlay("sit");
                            if (enemy.Left.hitTestObject(wall)) {
                                enemy.rotation += 1.8;
                        } else if (enemy.Right.hitTestObject(wall)) {
                            enemy.rotation -= 1.8;
                        }
                    }
                }