Shanti’s Dispatches

Been tinkering with Flash CS3 a bit lately.

Developed some rudimentary Galaga functionality after a few hours of playing with the canvas, timeline & ActionScript functionality.

This series of tutorials has also been a great resource.

My basic version of Galaga (screenshot):

Was able to get ship movement (via arrow keys), missile firing, enemy randomization / movement and missile hit detection working!

Hardcore coders usually phear the Flash (including the author for a long while) because of its quirky semantics, timeline & animation-based way of doing things. But I was surprised at how quickly one could develop a working prototype within a few short hours.

Once you know the basics of wiring things up, the ActionScript coding part for basic animation, etc. is a breeze. (syntax is just like JavaScript)

The Aftermath

When I tried to redo what I had done the night before, I kept bumping into this maddening error:
“Current selection cannot have actions applied to it”

I was getting that when trying to edit/add Actions (actionscript code) to an instance of a Movie Clip.

The Solution

The second time around, I had mistakenly selected ActionScript 3.0. Whereas the first go I was using ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 compatability.

That’s what the tutorials were suggesting (or they were just older, before 3.0 even existed).

I’ve heard good things about ActionScript 3.0, but after this experience it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. I’m still not even sure how one goes about adding ActionScript code to instances of Movie Clips, etc. in the 3.0 paradigm.

The style of using a “control” layer makes sense — but you’d not want to put 100% of your code in a flat function space. (php4/c-style, ick!) Bunching things into proper Classes and calling methods like “this._x” make things a lot simpler and more well-contained, codewise.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos