Dynamic MC referencing

programming flash
1

Howdy all…

Fried and trying to get a fairly simple thing put together, maybe you can help me out.

Very simple:

I have 45 instances of a little animated movieclip on the stage. I’m trying to get them to play at staggered intervals: When one instance reaches frame 14, I want the next one in the sequence to start. They’re all named piece_1, piece_2, etc.

I tried something like this (yeah the code is all wrong, but it illustrates what I’m trying to do):

_parent.i++
next_piece = "parent.piece_"+_parent.i
next_piece.play();

But for the life of me I can’t figure out how to reference them from inside the clip.

Oh, and the reason I have them all on stage rather than loading them dynamically (which would make the referencing a breeze) is because placement is very precise and can’t be done dynamically (well, not easily).

Thanks!

2

You should try and store your movieClips in an array when you are adding them to the stage, that way you have easy access to all their properties. This is a tutorial which helped me a lot: Array-tutorial

this works only when you add the MovieClips with AS.

you could also try getChildByName(“piece_” + parent.i)

(those work in AS3…not sure which one you use, please state this information in your question)

hope that helps you

3

Welp, I actually figured it out about 5 minutes ago…

Turns out you can use an alternate naming method that allows for variable naming… Observe:

_parent.n++;
next_piece = _parent["piece_"+_parent.n];
next_piece.play();