Example script

So you want to learn about action scripting? Cool.

ActionScripting is a great tool for enabling you to do pretty much anything you can think of with Flash. It is based on the Javascript model, which is great since you can apply everything you learn about Actionscript authoring directly to JavaScript authoring... thus making you extremely valuable.

Now when i first found out that Macromedia had decided changed things around with actionscript when they went from version 4 to 5 i was a bit upset... It seemed as though flash 5 actionscript was way out of my league... i soon realized that i was in for a huge learning curve... hey i'm a designer, not a programmer... So i taped the bridge of my glassses together and stuck my nose in the Actionscript help pages.

I'll admit i probably read through the entire actionscript reference portion of the flash online help about 7 or 8 times... each time i'd sit there and scratch my head and say "huh?" - The thoughts which crossed my mind from time to time were: "so these guys think i'm a programmer, and it will be real easy for me to convert my previous knowledge directly into this new actionscript - what a bunch of jerks" and "Oh i get it... write the help section really really bad so that YOU CAN CHARGE ME WHEN I CALL FOR TECHNICAL SUPPORT !!" Well i didn't give up reading through the pages and piecing together ideas from here or there... So after about six months worth of learning and building stupid games i am finally on the down side of learning about actionscript... There are still some things that i haven't ventured into, such as XML and Bitwise stuff but realistically, these are not really too important for core Flash Actionscripting... and i haven't had a project which required me to need these added functionalities.\

The material covered in this document is intended for smart people who are not programmers. So if you fail to meet either one of these requiremets... please terminate this window.

I'm not a "real" programmer... I'm kinda one of those guys who's in the middle of everything... Which means i have to be able to translate concepts back and forth between what i think the client said they want and what i think the program can do. So this means that i do alot of "creatine explaining" and creative problem solving... which means that i can translate idea's and concepts to the average person without getting all of the techno-mumbo-jumbo-garble into the conversation - and deliver a cool interactive piece which satisfies the clients expectations. This means that you will be reading and learning about actionscript from my non-programmer point of view.

I will be assuming that you already have some knowledge of how Flash works and have done a couple of projects already, and understand the Flash basics such as movie clips, layers, frames, and some of the basic actions like: gotoAndStop, getURL, play, stop, etc. And know how to name movie clips and frames, and set up basic buttons.