Avatar Layering and Animating in Flash - actionscript-3

So for my latest Flash project, I'm designing a game. The dimetric character can move in 8 directions. I've been given the spritesheets for the hats, hair styles, etc., that the player can wear.
The spritesheets contain the images for each direction, AND they contain four frames of animation (four per direction) for when the player is walking. This is basically the layout of the Spritesheet (and all of the files and "frames" are the same size, which makes things easier):
[IDLE] [WALKING]
[S][SE][E][N][NW][W][S1][S2][S3][S4][SE1][SE2]...
My goal is to embed all of the items in a single file other than the main one. But I need to implement walking animation.
One thought I had is to set the main SWF's framerate to 7 FPS, then use an Event.ENTER_FRAME handler to alternate between the walking ones. Programmatically animating.
Another thought is to create SWFs for each item of clothing, then use motion tweening to move the spritesheet symbol over the stage.
What I'd really like it so avoid using Adobe Animate entirely. Even if there's an approach that requires the use of Flex, I'd take it if it meant saying goodbye to graphically-designing.

using flash builder (flex) does not mean that good bye graphic! there is a relationship between Adobe Flash and any As3 Ide like FlashBuilder or FlashDevelop.
exporting movieclips and everything in library with .swc format, and then importing it by the IDE, read this
My goal is to embed all of the items in a single file other than the
main one. But I need to implement walking animation.
One thought I had is to set the main SWF's framerate to 7 FPS, then
use an Event.ENTER_FRAME handler to alternate between the walking
ones. Programmatically animating.
i dont undrestand! why 7 fps and also why Event.ENTER_FRAME
there might be a character movieclip, whit above frames in its time line, well! to playing any animation (for particular direction) you have to call mc.gotoAndPlay("walk_S"); then it will be played automatically, if you need lower frame rate, only select each frame by mouse pointer and then press [F5] in time line to insert a blank frame gape between keyframes.
as i said before, you must use a callback script at the end frame of the each loop animation like walk_s walk_ne ...
also idle animations must be called like it: mc.gotoAndStop("idle_s");

Related

How do i create an animation in AS3?

I am making a game in AS3 for a school project (using the AIR api). I have about a year's worth of experience in AS3, so i would say i'm proficient but not an expert. Anyway, i have never attempted to do sprite animations in AS3 and i'm not quite sure how to approach it.
If i create a list of bitmaps and call addChild() and removeChild() to display each frame of the animation, it would affect the framerate as these functions are not very efficient (i have tried this before and it tanked my framerate if i had too many animations going at once). I have also tried creating a list of BitmapData objects, adding a bitmap to the display list, and then pointing it to a different BitmapData each frame, but this does not seem to work at all.
So what is the best way to do this? In XNA, for example, i would create a sprite class that draws to the screen using a sprite batch, then i would create a list of sprite objects and cycle through them to create the animation. Is there any way to achieve a similar result in actionscript?
First (simple) method: you can just use multi-frame MovieClip for animation. Put an image in each frame, put a MovieClip on the stage and that's all. You can control this animation using play(), stop(), gotoAndPlay(), gotoAndStop(). It will work without much problems for a generic platform game (I did that myself long ago).
Second (advanced) method: use bitmap blitting. For each animation, create a bitmap image that holds each frame of the animation. Use this image as a source for copying pixels into your current animated object. You just need to copy a particular rectangle area inside a source bitmap that corresponds to the current frame.
The actual blitting happens here
destinationBitmapData.copyPixels(sourceBitmapData, areaRectangle, destinationPoint);
Where destinationBitmapData is your "canvas" that you're blitting to; sourceBitmapData is the source image holding all animation frames; areaRectangle is the Rectangle inside the source image defining which area to copy; destinationPoint is left-top coordinate of the copy area in your canvas.
The destination canvas can be just one small object (like your game character that is moving around) or the entire game screen with all objects. I.e. instead of blitting and adding each object separately, you can just have one big canvas and blit any necessary parts directly to it.
That said, there is already a number of various ready-made engines that use blitting and even advanced techniques like 3D acceleration for 2D sprites.
One of them is Starling.

Flash Actionscript 3.0 MovieClip Transitions (No Buttons)

I have 3 mc_MovieClips.
Each clip is on a different frame of the same layer in the main scene.
I do not want to use a button to control the play.
On startup, I want Clip1(On Frame1) to play, and when that is finished, Clip2(On Frame2) will play and so on.
I am a very beginner and using Flash Professional CC and actionscript 3.0. The only help I can seem to find calls for global variables, which no longer seem to exist.
I can provide more information if needed, I am just a really big beginner.
Try placing a parent.nextFrame(); on the last frame of each MovieClip and a stop(); on each frame of the parent clip (actual frames of your main scene).

AS3 - My animated object is too detailed, it crashes flash if I run with more than 1 on the stage

I have a Movieclip for a soldier, who can load, aim and fire a rifle. The animations work fine, but if I put 2 or more of them on the stage, when I run it it immediately crashes flash.
Is there any way to reduce the quality of the Movieclip so that I can have multiple soldiers on the screen without it crashing flash?
I am making a game which requires at least 40-50 of them to be on the screen at once.
Thanks.
Actionscript compiled by external soft crashes when uses symbols with set to false "visibility" attribute after adding this symbol to the stage. But when you compile same code in Flash IDE nothing happens. It's very hard to find.
Try to make all layers except one inactive by setting them "guide" type. Trying one by one you can find this violator layer and faster find sub symbol with switched off visibility.

How can I send control of the playhead back to a parent timeline from a movieclip using createJS?

I'm making a multi-part introductory animation for a game. It works when I preview in Flash, but not when I export using the CreateJS toolkit to get HTML5 output.
On my scene's timeline, I have this.stop(); on the first frame, as well as a movie clip that contains several seconds of animation (and which may have to change in length as we develop).
My second frame is labeled "sc2" and I would like the animation to pick up there when the first movieclip is finished. To accomplish this, I went into the first movie clip and put this on the last frame:
_parent.gotoAndPlay("sc2");
This works fine in Flash, but perhaps I can't use the _parent object in JS? Is there an alternative way to access the flow of control or another way to accomplish this? My goal is to avoid doing animation on the main timeline and to control the flow by scripting there so that if the length of the individual sections of animation changes, I don't have to change the start and end frames of the various sections in several places.

AS3 - looping through movieclips and rasterizing them to bitmapdatas - how to be sure frames are ready?

this is a newer version to a question i have asked before but have not received an answer to.
I am developing a mobile AIR app with many animations and tests have shown that using bitmaps and GPU rendering give the best performance across all mobile models. I receive normal vector animations from the app's artists, and have built a system which loops through these animations at runtime and draws the content into bitmapdatas.
my concern is looping through the movieclip's frames. If I have these lines of code:
for (var i:uint=1; i<mc.totalFrames+1; i++) {
mc.gotoAndStop(i);
bitmapData.draw(mc);
}
I can't be sure the frame got "constructed" before being drawn, and my tests with an Android tablet prove this right - sometimes frames aren't drawn.
This mc is off the display list obviously (we dont need to render to the screen). So is there a way to make sure the frame has been built before drawing it to a bitmapdata? (and waiting for FRAME_CONSTRUCTED, EXIT_FRAME, etc.. is obviously slow and unneeded)
any ideas?
thanx
Saar
more info to clarify:
this is a children's book. each page has animations in it. all these animations are vector animations in timelines in FLAs I receive from the devloping artists (not the users).
Every page has an FLA which i publish to a swf.
what i actually do is replace vector animations in loaded SWFs with bitmap version of them.
At app runtime, upon each new page, i load the swf, go though all the animations in it (looping through the content's children) and each movieclip i rasterize into array of bitmapdatas.
My custom "Bitmap Movieclip" places on the displaylist a replcaement bitmap for each movieclip, and on ENTER_FRAME i switch the bitmaps' bitmapdatas from the array.
this gives very hight performance
I'd suggest use a splash screen, and place your MC to be converted to the bitmap to the stage first, then draw to your bitmapData. Several issues had me force to put a DisplayObject being drawn to the stage before actual drawing once already, so this might be a quick fix for you too.
var splashBD:BitmapData=new BitmapData(stage.stageWidth,stage.stageHeight,false,0xffffff);
var splashBM:Bitmap=new Bitmap(splashBD); // draw a thing as needed here
addChild(splashBM);
addChildAt(MC_to_convert,getChildIndex(splashBM));
// then advance it by frames and draw.
sorry MY BAD
waiting for FRAME_CONSTRUCTED is the answer