Circle movieclip hit test with line sprite

1

So I’m working on my first game. It’s a top-down zombie shooter, basically. Nothing special, just getting used to AS3.

I’m trying to develop a hit test method for my game that has the player shoot a line out from his gun, the length of the line being the gun range, and if that line collides with a square hitbox (drawn inside the zombie movieclip symbol) then it fires the hit test. The problem is, when I draw the line as a sprite, I’m pretty sure that it’s creating a rectangular bounding box around the drawn line, thus screwing up the hit test.

Here’s my code for the entire shooting function so far:


private function shootBullet():void {
			
	//get global coordinates of gun
	var linePoint:Point = new Point(player.player_gun.x, player.player_gun.y);
	var gunX:int = player.localToGlobal(linePoint).x;
	var gunY:int = player.localToGlobal(linePoint).y;
	
	//set start point 10 px from registration point of gun w/angle of gun
	var radius:int =- 18;
	var gunRange:uint = 500;

	var lineStartX:Number = gunX + radius * Math.cos(bullet_angle);
	var lineStartY:Number = gunY + radius * Math.sin(bullet_angle);
	var lineEndX:int = lineStartX - gunRange * Math.cos(bullet_angle);
	var lineEndY:int = lineStartY - gunRange * Math.sin(bullet_angle);
		
	//var lineBullet:LineBullet = new LineBullet(lineStartX, lineStartY, lineEndX, lineEndY);
	
	var lineBullet:Sprite = new Sprite();
        parent.addChild(lineBullet);
	var g:Graphics = lineBullet.graphics;
	g.lineStyle(0, 0x000000);
			
	var startX:int = lineStartX;
	var startY:int = lineStartY;
			
	var endX:int = lineEndX;
	var endY:int = lineEndY;
			
	g.moveTo(startX, startY);
	g.lineTo(endX, endY);
			
	if(lineBullet.hitTestPoint(zombie.x, zombie.y, true)) {
		trace("Zombie Hit");
	} else {
		trace("Missed Zombie");
	}
}

It’s spaghetti code right now, I know. Also I never finished commenting xD. I will soon be distributing the snippets of codes into proper classes, but for now I just want to get this working.

Can anyone suggest a better way to go about doing this? I want to keep my draw-a-line method. I’m going to implement some small timers to simulate bullet speed and such, so I don’t actually have to draw/animate bullets.

Thanks,

Nate