my first AS3 script - critique

Hello people, I’ve been learning AS3 for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve made a script for my Hummungbird.

My goal was to give it some sort of natural behavior. Its functions are simple,pick one of the flowers at random and go to it for a while, then move on to another flower.

That’s what I managed to do so far: http://rapidshare.com/files/137405812/HummingBird25.swf

Here’s the script: http://pastie.org/253353

It’s very messy and not really in accordance with AS3 spirit. But I wanted to do something with what I learned so far. And I wanted some critique along the way.

So, I’m ready for any comments. Bombs away!

nice… you should have some more hummingbirds randomly flying in also..

i like how it changes the angle of the bird as it leans into the flower nice bit of coding

Here’s the same file, instanced twice, with rays Of Light from dxc381 as background.

Actionscript is so cool

I didn’t study the whole script, but one little tip use TimerEvent.TIMER instead of “timer”

You should get yourself acquainted with arrays, they make life a lot easier.

For example, birdTarget is currently ~50 lines of code. If you put the 4 flowers into an array called fArray (for example) the code could look like this.

birdTarget():void{

for(var i:uint = 0; i<fArray.length; i++){
     fArray[i].alpha = 0
}
fArray[_nextTarget].alpha = 1;
_prevTargetX = _nextTargetX;
_prevTargetY = _nextTargetY;
_nextTargetX = fArray[_nextTarget].x;
_nextTargetY = fArray[_nextTarget].y;
_birdRotation = fArray[_nextTarget].rotation;
}

The basic idea is that once you can reference an object with a number, you can wright more dynamic functions and avoid manual recursion.

@lars019: I used “timer” based on some tutorial from kirupa I think. I even left it’s name intact timerExample() . What’s the difference between that and TimerEvent.TIMER?

@geoken: I’m starting with arrays just now. I really had trouble keeping track of my objects with switch and conditional statements.

thanks for the advice, people!