Create many sprites of the same kind

1

Hi kirupa forum!

I’m developing flash applications in actionscript with a simple text editor rather than the gui flash fx mx whatever-they’re-called and it’s working out quite well. But there is one particular feature that I don’t know about how to use without such a flash-creating-application.

Is it possible to maintain some kind of a library of movieclips? (drawn with the graphics class) In such a way that you can create an instance of it without having to draw it all over again, just copy it?

right now I’m using something like this:

function drawACar():MovieClip {
    var car:MovieClip;
    /* draw it */
    return car;
}

var shortCar:MovieClip = drawACar();
var longCar:MovieClip = drawACar();
longCar.width *= 2;

any idea how i could create hundreds of such cars without having to draw them hundreds of times? I thought about copying them but that doesn’t seem to be possible.