Let a MC follow a controllable MC

Hi there!

After a long time of reading on these forums, I am now, unfortunately, forced to make a post as well and, again unfortunately, it is not the helping kind.

I am currently working on a Shoot em Up game, in which I have a -astroids- like shipMC which is controlled by the Right Up Left -principle (also stolen from asteroids). All this stuff is perfectly working (I am using the stats plugin from mrdoob for a fps/ms checkup).

So far so good, but. When I want to add additional weapons that circulate around the ship I am receiving huge frame-drops. When I simply give the weaponMC the x and y value from the shipMC as a reference, my FPS drops from a steady 60 to 30 and less.

I used different approaches, even with a small buffer of values through arrays and such, but nothing seems to work? The only thing that works a little bit is to add the weaponMC to the controllable shipMC. And this only works when I draw a invisible line between the weapon and the ship, otherwise I get the same fps drops. Perhaps this has something to do with the way Flash draws its stage??? I rather not use this method as it is very ugly (still drops of 3-6 frames per second) and it adds a lot of other difficulties in terms of placement.

So how to solve this? I have similar problems with my scrolling backgrounds (which are not tile-based) as they consist out of different layers and need to scroll all at once, but at different speeds. I did not tried a tiled-based method, but I guess that is the only solution.

Thank you in advance!