IntroductionThis tutorial explains how to use an array for hitTest purposes. Most tutorials show how to duplicate movieClips for games (or other purposes), but when looked at carefully are very inefficient. This tutorial looks at creating an array which holds the names of the duplicated clips, then when we do a loop to check for hits, the loop only searches for clips that exist. More will be explained later. Included Files: hitTestArray.fla Source code for this tutorial.
TheoryGenerally, people will create their actionScript to duplicate a movie, then hitTest from 0 to the most recent clip, this is highly inefficient, because if your game has been going on for say, an hour, each frame could be checking thousands of clips (even if they are not there!) Therefore we need a system to look for only the clips that are currently active. What we will be doing is creating an array, then every time a movieClip is duplicated it is given a name and that name is put in the array. Then when we do a hitTest loop, we will step through all the names in the array. When a movieClip is removed, its name will be removed from the array.
There are two ways to implement this kind of system. I could write a tutorial about making a FILO stack in flash (using push/pop) however this wouldnt be effective in a game environment as things may get removed out of the order they are brought into the environment.
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|Chris 'PrED' Rhodes|
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