Question

I´m making a level creator for my platformer game on AS3. I´m looking for a way of getting a graphical representation of a library object on my .fla, so the user can insert that object on the world on the desired coordinate. What I mean with this is that I just want a picture of the first frame of the mc, without taking its properties and methods (without the need to make a .jpg containing that image), because that´s when problems begin to appear, and I just want the object functionality on play mode, not the level creator.

Let´s say, for example, a ball that bounces all the time by updating its location every frame. On the level creator I just want to get the ball picture to insert it on the desired location. If I take the whole ball object to the level creator it won´t stop bouncing and it will mess things up.

I hope I´m clear… I just want to know if there is a practical solution to this; if not then I´ll make a class where all the world objects would extend to, that has a init() function that initializes all the object functionality, so it´s called only on play mode and not on level creator. Thanks for reading anyway.

Answer 1

What you’re doing wrong is adding functionality directly to the MovieClip.

Please read one of my previous answers that covers this concept in more depth.

MovieClips should be used for the display only, representing the graphics of an actual game class, for example:

public class Player
{
    // Graphics that represent the Player.
    protected var display:MovieClip;

    // Constructor.
    public function Player()
    {
        display = new PlayerMovieClip();
    }
}

Anyways, once you fix that you can take a Bitmap sample of MovieClips using BitmapData and its draw():

// Assume that 'mc' is your MovieClip.
var sample:BitmapData = new BitmapData(mc.width, mc.height, true, 0);
sample.draw(mc);

// This is your image.
var texture:Bitmap = new Bitmap(sample);