so I read through both of the tutorials posted.. I guess I understand them, but I wasn’t really a fan of how either of them was written. the sound one seemed a little specialized..I dont see a gap of .046 seconds having a huge effect on most kinds of projects. I found the book to be more useful than the tutorials. I think I have an idea for my excercise..just gotta see what it starts looking like..

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I think I’m finally finished with this thing..ended up doing a pretty standard implementation of minesweeper. one thing I didn’t get to work was clearing all the adjacent empty tiles with one click..I was able to get it to do a maximum of 9 reliably though, so its not too bad. Aside from some elements that are in the Library, there’s only a single frame of actionscript..before I never thought I’d make a flash project with no items on the stage (I didn’t even think it was possible..)

here’s the .swf and the .fla

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so I got my minesweeper working a little better, and figured I’d bring it with me to work on in the lab today (since I’m stuck here working 12-4). Turns out Flash decided that my code, which had worked fine up until the last save, suddenly has “Type mismatch” problems..

here’s fla file of the last save, and a swf of the last successful test-build (from my computer at home)

well, after having doug help me troubleshoot it, turs out I had to change my board[i][j].c = _root.attachMovie("tile", ["t"+this.board[i][j].id], this.board[i][j].id); to read
board[i][j].c = attachMovie("tile", ["t"+this.board[i][j].id], this.board[i][j].id);
go figure..

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well, I finally decided I’d try making minesweeper for this project..seemed easy enough. I managed to get the grid of tiles arranged and accepting clicks pretty quickly, and testing for bombs just takes a pretty simple nested for loop. finally ran into trouble while I was trying to figure out how to get it to “auto-clear” empty tiles when you click on an empty one. haven’t gotten anything that works properly yet..but I figured I’d toss up the work-in-progress anyway..

rant: I don’t understand why flash’s undo function only takes into account some changes to your actionscript..it makes debugging a whole lot harder than it needs to be.

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thought I’d play around with the empty file idea..so I used the actionscript to draw a movie clip and then add to it once it’s initially drawn. it’s still pretty primative, but it was just an excercise..every time you load it it should look a little different in the end (unless the random number generator isn’t random enough..)

links to the .swf and .fla files.

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Well, this one wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The image I chose to vectorize was a lot simpler this time, but it worked really well for the idea I had to script it. Almost the entire key was drawn with the regular flash tools, and I used way to many layers again.. (17 including layers that only served as guides and are hidden). Makes it easier to go back and re-tweak certain things I guess. So the notches are the only part of the key that’s drawn with the script. I have a line drawn for the outline, and the last 2 line segments (which close the shape) are drawn the same color as the fill to make them invisible. There’s 23 points on the line, and a total of 9 variables to control their position (a few never move).

You can view the .swf or download the source.

edit: I was going to modify the source to smooth the transitions between each set of notches, but then I realized that the lineto() function only allows integer values..so that made it kind of pointless to pursue (not much you can do to smooth a change of 2 pixels if you can move a minimum of 1 pixel at a time). It’s kind of annoying how many of flash’s built-in functions will only accept integers, but it has no problem placing your points/objects at decimal values when you modify things on the canvas.

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well, that took a bit longer than I thought it would. decided it would be good practice to trace the entire vector drawing by hand instead of using the convert to vector option in flash after touching it up in photoshop. here’s a side-by-side of the raster and vector versions

edit: so maybe I went a little overboard, but I used a total of 14 layers in flash (just about every color has its own layer). The original jpeg is 58k, and the flash file is 11k.

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