This will be a quick post on some gotcha’s to keep an eye out for when loading your ActionScript 3 game swf from a preloader swf. Nothing revolutionary here, back in mid-December, I had posted a blog on ActionScript 3’s Event Handling and the stopPropagation method and just the other day working on the code for a new game project, I ran into a situation where I should’ve used the method, didn’t, and ran into some issues.
Note: If you’re here looking for code on how to write a flash preloader, Lee Brimlow’s video tutorial on Preloading in AS3 gives a beautiful example. When I was originally learning how to code a preloader, that tutorial, and a couple of other tutorials around the net that escape my memory at the moment, were absolutely perfect.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Code Examples, Game Development, Tutorials
It’s some sort of crazy nerdtastic Data Structure Deathmatch!
The Adobe Actionscript 3 Dictionary Class Vs Object Vs Array! Man it’s awesome to have a language to work in, just like a great RPG where everyone’s got their strengths and weaknesses and it all works together to make awesome flashlove all over the web.
“What is a Dictionary Class and Why Should I read this post?”
Here’s the results from my testing right up front and I feel like it’s a good rough estimate of where each excells.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Benchmarking, Code Examples
I’ve periodically run into issues playing around with EventListeners where I want to remove one EL, and add another in the same function, something similar to the following code below. First, a quick note on what’s going on in the code so we’re all on the same page. I have a movie clip “defensive structure,” say, a tower for a Tower Defense game. It has been added to the stage and I attached an EL to this movie clip of the tower when I added it to the stage, listening for a MOUSE_DOWN event on said tower.
Since then, I’ve added a few other movie clips INTO the tower Movie Clip. The first issue I ran into was that normally I’ll use “e.target” as the “hey what did I click” variable to trace out or find out just what exactly was clicked. e.target was pointing at a child of my tower movieclip, which gave me a number of errors like, “this function does not belong to this movie clip,” because functions belong to classes, and I’m targeting just a simple sprite or movie clip.
However, e.currentTarget returns the containing DisplayObjectContainer of e.target. Usually e.currentTarget would trace out to be [object Stage], but since I specifically added e.target as a child of my defense movie clip, e.currentTarget is returning the actual object I need, the Defense object.
So, let’s take a look:
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Event Handling, Event Listeners
A friend of mine that enjoys bitching until I help her with whatever popped into her head that moment messages me tonight. “Hey for my site [that you'll make for me for free because i'm a girl and your friend] I want a menu system like that one I showed you [which you're supposed to magically remember out of all the sites you've seen on the whole internet in your life].” After she re-sent me the link, a beautiful site called ilovedust I took a look at the slick little fish-eye style menu and said, “Yeah that’s Animation, I do code. Not pretty stuff like that.”
After 5 minutes of receiving complaining message (but mostly once my game was finished that I was playing at Kongregate, I actually thought about what was happening in that menu, and after about 20 minutes of coding, had a workable menu. I thought I’d post the code here and make a little tutorial out of it.
I love TweenLite. And TweenMax. And pretty much everything at GreenSock. Once you learn the class, it makes everything so easy. For those that are here who are AS2 coders… a) Upgrade! and b) They also have AS2 versions of all of their code. There are a number of other Tween libraries to choose from. Some perform better than others. But TweenLite was the first for me that ‘made sense’ in my budding AS3 days, which still continue.
This is a quick little example of making a 5 menu-item menu that does stuff when you mouse-over. You could probably think of a million ways to optimize this code; putting the menu items in a loop to initialize and things like that. I’m just going to lay it out, and you can make your own better.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Tutorials, TweenLite
Ok folks, a number of tutorials have been written about creating a Tower Defense ( TD ) style game using Flash. The problem I ran into was that none of them seemed to be using Actionscript 3, or they were helpful but just not what I was looking for. So, I am hereby writing one as I work on mine.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Game Development, Tutorials