One more thing about randomness...

[carmenMiranda]

If you have read any of my recent posts you'll have worked out that I'm a bit of actionscript newbie who is experimenting with dynamically attached and positioned movie clips.

My latest stumbling block (and thus question) concerns the following: I have a section of code that takes one MC and places numerous instances of that MC to the stage. Rolling over those clips activates a function which references each individual clip by name (thanks Kenneth!). That works perfectly for one MC.

But what if I have a number (let's say 5, for this example) of different MC in the library and want to place instances of these at random?

I first thought of putting the 5 MC into an array, then randomly choosing a position in the array, and then passing the selected MC name to the 'nowGoAndPlaceThisMC' function.

However, I can't seem to make that work.

So my question is : is what i am trying to do conceptually correct (if so, my code construction must be *completely* wrong) or is there a different (simpler?) approach to achieve the same goal?

As always, thanks in advance for any advice with this.

 

[JRBeltman]

Hi there, not sure if I get you right,
but you want multiple movieclips in your flash and do something with them?

I took a bit of code I am using in the hope you can study it and take from it that what you need.

In principle it creates a movieclip from scratch (you can replace this with an instance) within a movieclip called thumbnail_mc.

Each clip gets a character and number assigned to it so you can refer to them later (t1, t2, t3 , t4 etc).

You can also assign actions to these clips, usually using something like: this._alpha = 10% orso.

I add a listener object to check if the movie clip has fully loaded. I do this because my clips are filled with jpgs I am loading from an external source and I need to get more information about them, but can't get this until they are fully loaded.... a real pain.

eval("thumbnail_mc.t"+k) will translate to 'thumbnail_mc.t0', 'thumbnail_mc.t1', etc
This is helpful to know when you need to call these movie clips. I tried to do this before with an array, but failed because I didn't know about using 'eval'.

Well, if you need any help, just post a reply

for (k=0; k<10; k++) 
{
 thumbnails_fn(k);

 // lets look at the x position of each clip just as an example to see how to call them after creation

 trace(eval("thumbnail_mc.t"+k)._x);

}


function thumbnails_fn(k) 
{ 
	thumbnail_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("t"+k, thumbnail_mc.getNextHighestDepth()); 
	
	tlistener = new Object(); 
	tlistener.onLoadInit = function(target_mc) 
	{ 		
		target_mc.pictureValue = k; 
		
		target_mc.onRelease = function() 
		{ 
                  // do something if you like
		}; 

		target_mc.onRollOver = function() 
		{ 
                   // do something if you like
		}; 
		
		target_mc.onRollOut = function() 
		{ 
                   // do something if you like
		};

	}; 		

	image_mcl = new MovieClipLoader(); 
	image_mcl.addListener(tlistener); 
	image_mcl.loadClip(path+thumbnails[k], "thumbnail_mc.t"+k); 
}

JR (

http://www.jrbeltman.com)

IT = Logic (except for a well known OS where it equals luck) -> Back to the Basics!

 

[carmenMiranda]

Hi - thanks very much for the answer, but I eventually managed to get this working using an array. I've posted the code in case it might help someone at some point in the future:

var ballList:Array = new Array("blueBall_mc", "orangeBall_mc", "pinkBall_mc", "greenBall_mc", "purpleBall_mc", "redBall_mc");

var nextBall:String;

function pickBall():Void {
	var randBall:Number;
	randBall = Math.floor(Math.random() * ballList.length);
	nextBall = ballList[randBall];
	trace(nextBall);
}

pickBall();

 

[JRBeltman]

Hi, I would be interested to see what on earth you have been putting together
Any URL?

JR (

http://www.jrbeltman.com)

IT = Logic (except for a well known OS where it equals luck) -> Back to the Basics!

 

[carmenMiranda]

Hehe... not yet...