problems with multiple if statements

[defkon2012]

I have a problem with this game I am making.

I need a better way to detect if a enemy ship has come into contact with one of the hero's bullets. Right now on every enemy I have a if statement that has way too many || or statements in it. I have 40 different friendly bullets that need to be checked for hitTest within my if statement.
So I have something that looks like this...

CODE FOR ENEMY SHIP
if(this.hitTest(bullet01)||this.hitTest(bullet02)||this.hitTest(bullet03)... ect ect
all the way to bullet40.

now when I have multiple enemys on screen all running this incredible if statement, I have a major problem with processor speed.

So my question is, would anyone know how to do this better? I have been thinking there is a way using the
substring() function. Using it to detect if the characters "bullet" is in a string. But I have had problems incorporating it with a if and hitTest statement.

does anyone have a suggestion on how to detect if a movieClip has come into contact with one of 40 other movieClips without running 40 if statements or ||?

thank you
defkon2012

 

[wangbar]

You'll still need to use "ifs" but you could do this more efficiently with a loop...

for (i=1;i<=40;i++){
currentBullet=_root[&quot;bullet&quot;+i];
if(this.hitTest(currentBullet)){
//do stuff
}
}

...you'll have to rename &quot;bullet01&quot; to &quot;bullet1&quot; etc. for this to work either that or add an extra line which adds he zero by string concatenation but that's comparatively a very slow process.

Either way you still have to run hitTest 40 times which is pretty intensive - it might be an idea to check if the bullets are in the same general area as your target first and only hitTest the ones which are closest.