Bump, I really need an explanation on how this limitation works, I can temporarily deal with it, but it's going to be a problem in the long run.

At 7/5/08 03:29 PM, dark101 wrote: I don't get what you're talking about, are you trying to make it skip frames?

No, it's just flash is not letting me put as much on a single frame as I want to.

I've been experimenting with flash a bit. If I draw a massive amount of squiggly lines on one frame and then put a square on a later frame and then put a gotoAndStop() to the square in the first frame, the square won't show up. However, it seems like as long as I stay within the limit for lines in one frame then I can copy and paste that frame as many times as I want in that animation and nothing will disappear. On the other hand, in my game I have a lot of lines on one frame, and then a lot of lines on another frame, but my lines on the later frame don't start disappearing until after I'm displaying a ton of them on the screen at once. If I clear the previous frame, the lines will reappear on the later frame. I don't really understand it, does anyone know exactly what this limitation is?

At 4/22/08 03:12 PM, twistedduck wrote: Creating dynamically = with actionscript
Depth = Each movieClip occupies a UNIQUE depth. _root is depth 0

If you give your movieclip a linkage id (right click it in the library to do this) you can attach it with:
_root.attachMovie('linkage','n'+_root.ge tNextHighestDepth(),_root.getNextHighest Depth());

Then remove it with:
movieclip.removeMovieClip();

So I doubt I have 16,000 depths then. Okay. Damn, I wish I had the slightest idea why my MCs are disappearing. I suppose I need to limit the number of visible MCs for the sake of speed anyway, so I'll try what you said. That's working around a bug, though, it's not fixing it. It may come back and bite me in the ass. I guess I'll keep asking whether anyone has had the issue of movieclips disappearing when there were too many shapes/lines on the screen. Maybe, I'll get lucky and someone will have run into a similar problem before. All I can really say about this frame is I've got thousands of lines of code, many movies with code inside them, code attached to multiple movie clips, movie clips within movie clips, etc. So it's complex.

Can somebody elaborate on the deleting, reattaching thing?

At 4/22/08 12:30 PM, twistedduck wrote: Well, there is a limit but its a very big one - you can have up to 1,048,575 depths.That is if you create them dynamically, if you create movieclips manually then the limit is 16,384. Do you have that many?

What do you mean by depths exactly? From my estimations if you counted every frame, shape, and line then it could be around 16,000. What do you mean by creating them dynamically? Does that mean create them with actionscript?

At 4/22/08 11:02 AM, Rustygames wrote: What is the limit you think you've found? I bet it's something wrong with your code rather then a flash limitation

Well, at least that's fixable, although I have no idea how I would find that bug. Basically, I found out when I ran it that the things on the highest layers would disappear when it was started, so I deleted some of the MC clips and it worked. I found out that if I deleted some of drawn lines in the animation and replaced them with straight lines it would work again. Then I tested it by drawing lines all over the main stage and saw how many I could draw before the movie clips on the top layer disappeared. I assumed I reached the limit of how many lines I could display at one time, but maybe that wasn't the case. Do you have any ideas what it might be?

MovieClip.removeMovieClip() and MovieClip.attachMovie()?

At 4/22/08 09:40 AM, twistedduck wrote: You can always delete it, then reattach it when you need it.

Can you elaborate?

Oh my God, I found out that if I have too much drawn in one frame then certain things won't show up. I guess it makes sense since things drawn outside the screen slow it down, but I honestly didn't even consider that this would happen. This is going to make designing this game a huge pain in the ass unless there is some way to bypass it. The only way I can think to get around it is to just switch to similar frames with the same script all of the time. Is there some way to swap out animations until you need them? _visible doesn't actually make animations disappear. People do make massive games with completely smooth graphics so there must be a way.

I would say the basic motion is almost perfect. The jumping feels natural and the fps is good. I've played flash platform games that felt a lot worse. Now, just work on those bugs :)

Good luck with the collision detection, it's a pain in the ass.

: But then what? First of, what are layers even good for?

Different motion tweens, and just plain organizing your stuff

: Secondly, how can I just simply get more fluid animation (other than adding more frames).

Umm, add more frames? Seriously, that's how you get stuff more fluid.

: I just need overall advice to take my animations from average to expert.

Okay, you want to become an expert on stick figure animation. Here's what you do. Find the best stick figure animation you can. Imagine something even better. Make it. Come up with stuff that's never been done before. Work as long as it takes to make this animation. If it takes 6 months, then work on it for 6 months. The people who make amazing flash animations spend absurd amounts of time doing them. Stick figure animations don't really take much artistic talent, so that's even better for you. You can stick to simple frame by frame animation. All you need to do is just put massive amounts of hours into it. That, and your initial idea needs to be good. Creativity. Time. That's all it takes.

Really amazing job. I'm bookmarking that page.

I'll try one of those, thanks.

I've tried forever to figure out collision detection with irregularly shaped objects. I can only get it to where it works 95% of the time at best, which for what I'm trying to do was completely unnaceptable. There are a few tutorials on irregularly shaped object collision detection that you can find with google.
I tried several things before giving up and going with square shaped objects. If you're just doing a ball it may be fine though, I wanted to do collision detection with moving shape tweens.

Pretty self explanatory. For example, say you have:

var my_format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

I want my_format to be an Array;

This gives me an error message:

my_format = new Array();
var my_format[1]:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

As does this:

var my_format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
my_format = new Array();

So I'm not sure what to do. Any help is appreciated.

At 8/25/07 06:16 PM, DreamworX wrote: This might help you understand better, if not try googling for some more tutorials.

Okay, apparently all I had to do was put _root in the parameter. Thank god this works, it gives me infinitely more control over collision detection than hittest. Thank you for finding that link. I searched google but couldn't find any tutorials. Now I realize that all I had to do was put getbounds tutorial. I feel stupid now. Oh well, at least I know what to do now.

Okay, glad to know it works, but I don't understand the flash help at all. This is what the script is supposed to look like as far as I can tell.

blank.getBounds(blank).xMin

What do I put in for the blank values to get it to return a value representing the location of the movieclip?

I'm actually looking for an alternative to hittest since I want to get moving movie clips to react before they hit each other. There's a bug in my code causing moving objects to occasionally get stuck together. I'm looking for a workaround.

Okay, I was wondering if this is possible.

Say I have a movieclip that is in the corner of the stage and is a a 50 by 50 square. The right edge of the movieclip would have an x coordinate value of 50, and the left would be 0. Y at the top would be 0 and the bottom would be 50. Is there any way I can make a script to return those values? I thought getBounds with xMin and xMax might work, but I think it may do something different than what I want. Then again I can't find a description of getBounds on the internet which makes sense, so maybe it would work if I used it correctly.

Any help is appreciated.

This is a script I have to make monsters move on the screen, but not walk into each other. I want to have about 20 monsters in a battle sequence(not on the screen at the same time of course), so this could get a little complicated with the current script, which is absurdly long. I thought somebody with a natural talent for creating script(which I lack, if I get a script working it's pretty much by luck :p), might be able to quickly tell me a way to make this script shorter. BTW, I couldn't get an if statement to detect more than 1 hittest(a bug in flash maybe?), that's the reason for the mob1, mob2, mob3, variables. I know it seems inefficient.

Thanks.

Hopefully this is semi-readable after these boards format it...

onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
if (_global.battleTime == 0) {
if (_global.spacesMoved == 0) rand = random(4)+1;
if (_global.spacesMoved == 0) rand2 = random(50)+1;
if (_global.spacesMoved != rand2) {
mob2 = _root.mob1_mc.hitTest(_root.mob2_mc);
mob3 = _root.mob1_mc.hitTest(_root.mob3_mc);
if (!mob2 && !mob3) {
if (rand == 1) _root.mob1_mc._x++;
if (rand == 2) _root.mob1_mc._x--;
if (rand == 3) _root.mob1_mc._yf++;
if (rand == 4) _root.mob1_mc._y--;
} else {
if (rand == 1) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob1_mc._x--;
}
if (rand == 2) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob1_mc._x++;
}
if (rand == 3) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob1_mc._y--;
}
if (rand == 4) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob1_mc._y++;
}
}
mob1 = _root.mob2_mc.hitTest(_root.mob1_mc);
mob3 = _root.mob2_mc.hitTest(_root.mob3_mc);
if (!mob1 && !mob3) {
if (rand == 1) _root.mob2_mc._x--;
if (rand == 2) _root.mob2_mc._y--;
if (rand == 3) _root.mob2_mc._x++;
if (rand == 4) _root.mob2_mc._y++;
} else {
if (rand == 1) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob2_mc._x++;
}
if (rand == 2) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob2_mc._y++;
}
if (rand == 3) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob2_mc._x--;
}
if (rand == 4) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob2_mc._x--;
}
}
mob1 = _root.mob3_mc.hitTest(_root.mob1_mc);
mob2 = _root.mob3_mc.hitTest(_root.mob2_mc);
if (!mob1 && !mob2) {
if (rand == 1) _root.mob3_mc._y++;
if (rand == 2) _root.mob3_mc._y--;
if (rand == 3) _root.mob3_mc._x++;
if (rand == 4) _root.mob3_mc._x--;
} else {
if (rand == 1) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob3_mc._y--;
}
if (rand == 2) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob3_mc._y++;
}
if (rand == 3) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob3_mc._x--;
}
if (rand == 4) {
_global.spacesMoved = rand2-1;
_root.mob3_mc._x++;
}
}
_global.spacesMoved++;
if (_global.spacesMoved == rand2) _global.spacesMoved = 0;
}
}
}

At 8/14/07 05:58 PM, KynetiK-27 wrote: That what i dont get. If i knew the precise hit area x and y coordinates, wtf would i need a hittest method at all, and how the hell do i get the x and y coordinates for such complex irregular shapes?

Well, I read something on another forum. Flash apparently doesn't have any true collision detection. I think the x and y parameters are for a point only. I'm going to give up on the moving walls thing and do something else.

Well, so far the descriptions I'm finding of shapeflags makes no sense. http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/actio n_scripts/actionscript_dictionary/action script_dictionary534.html says "this parameter can be specified only if the hit area is identified using x and y coordinate parameters." Just what the hell do I have to specify for x and y?

At 8/14/07 04:59 PM, teenagegluesniffer wrote: shapeflags

Maybe I'm retarded but I don't understand at all what the help file is saying. Will changing the value of the shapeflag make it work? If so, how do I do that?

Okay, vcam is a possibility.

Let me show you my most basic dillema.

You can see in the attached picture what I'm doing.

Here's my script:

wall_mc.onEnterFrame = function() {
if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT)) {
if (!player_mc.hitTest(wall_mc)) {
this._x += 6;
}
}
}

When you press right the wall moves, but it stops when it reaches the rectangular border of the movie clip instead of going around the player icon until it hits the gray area. That tutorial I posted allows you to go between the walls, but this is very different. How would you make the wall go around the player where there is nothing in it?

I should mention the first problem I'm having is that the hittest command seems to treat the walls as a square, so if it's something like a circle you'll stop around the corners. However, that tutorial I showed you somehow finds a way to bypass this and let you go between a where there is nothing drawn. I'm not exactly sure why this works in the tutorial, but not with the basic stuff that I'm doing.

Okay here's what I want to accomplish. You're familiar with the way most RPGs work. Your character doesn't actually move from the center of the screen. When you issue a move order your character just turns and the world moves in that direction. I can't recall ever seeing this in Flash. In everything I've seen the parts of the world are divided into screens and your character moves from screen to screen. The character actually moves and not the world. I found a tutorial on how to do this: http://www.webwasp.co.uk/tutorials/b32-c ollision-detection/tutorial.php. Easy enough. However, I'd rather do the standard RPG movement. Is flash advanced enough to pull it off? I suppose the next question will be how do I do it if it's possible?

I'm going to bump this on the off chance that somebody has come across this before.

At 9/13/06 08:14 PM, Snubby wrote:

At 9/13/06 05:25 PM, jimgray wrote: Key.addListener(keyListener);

Key.addEventListener("keyDown", keyListener);

Damn, that didn't work either. I think I may be screwed. There is one thing that I can't pull of if I can't get onKeyDown to work.

Guess I might as well bump this.