Daryl Teo’s Blog

Blame CSI.

Anyway, its been an exciting past few days for me. University choices and such. So exciting, in fact, that I have been neglecting this blog (again). Many apologies!

So, in a month, a Bachelor of Software Engineering course awaits me. Australia’s the location. So hook me up if you’re gonna be in the area in Semester 1, 2007!

A little looking around the web, and this stood out.

From http://www.flashguru.co.uk/undocumented-actionscript-3/#comments

It allows you to specify a function that is called when the playhead of the Movieclip timeline enters the specified frame number. Their are four parameters to the method, i only completley understand the purpose of the first two, the other two are worth investigating more.

While I am trying to get away from scripting on frames, there are definately situations where it is essential (and this simply provides a cleaner way to do frame-scripting, but not on a frame). One of my older projects (currently stalled) involved a MovieClip that had animations for turning in different directions, and I had to use copious amounts of frame-scripting for me to know when each “animation” had completed. This should come in handy.

Anyway, Senocular came up with the appropriate usage of this method:

addFrameScript(...rest);

Arguments must be in pairs, frame-number followed by function. Note that frame-number 0 refers to the very first frame. Also, your MovieClip must have that number of frames before it will execute.

addFrameScript(2, frameMethod1, 5, frameMethod2);
function frameMethod1():void
{
  trace("Frame 3 reached");
}
function frameMethod2():void
{
  trace("Frame  6 reached");
}

Ever got sick of creating 2 dimensional arrays? Wanted a class to do it for you?

Try this class I whacked together in a flurry of inspiration (I’m kidding myself - give me a break).

dynamic class Grid extends Array{
  private var vw:uint
  private var vh:uint

  public function Grid(vx:uint, vy:uint)
  {
    vw = vx;
    vh = vy;    

    for (var i:int=0; i< vx; i++)
    {
      this[i] = new Array(vy);
    }
  }

  public function get width():uint
  {
    return vw;
  }
  public function get height():uint
  {
    return vh;
  }
}

What this class does at the moment is relatively simple.

You simply declare a variable as a new Grid like so

var myGrid:Grid = new Grid(10,10);

That will create a 2 dimensional array 10×10. You can then reference it as you’d do a normal 2 dimensional array:

trace(myGrid[4][1]);

And that’s the end of my trivial actionscript pursuits. Enjoy!