Question

I’m trying to replicate the motion of a ‘mexican wave’. I am using Flash CS5, and using AS2.

I’ve created a ‘jumper’ graphic and animated it in a clip so it jumps once – up then falls back to the ground. I’ve pulled the clip in to the main timeline and replicated a bunch of times so I have a row of ‘jumpers’. I’ve given each instance a unique ID. Then I’m telling each clip instance to start playing, in sequence, using the following code:

var total_jumpers = 36;
var i = 0;
var jumpLag = 1000;

function do_jump(bottle) {
    jumper.play();
}

for( i=1; i<=total_jumpers; i++)
{
    var mcName:String = "b" + i;
    jump = setInterval(do_jump,jumpLag,this[mcName]);
    trace("Jumper " + mcName + ". Lag: " + jumpLag);
    jumpLag += 100;
}

clearInterval(jump);

stop();

In the clip, I have put stop() in the last frame to try and stop it looping.

So this works ok, but the clips seem to loop – I can’t get them to stop.

I would be grateful for any insight / assistance.

Answer 1

setInterval is probably not the best way to do this because it repeats continuously until clearinterval is called.. setInterval returns a different ID for each call – think of it as the unique ID for each timer.

The code which calls clearInterval it’s actually only clearing the last interval. clearInterval needs to be called for each ID returned by setInterval. This would require storing the IDs in an array, then calling the clearInterval for the specific ID after the animation has started.

A better way to do this would be to use setTimeout (see flash.utils.setTimeout) because it only runs once and then dies, meaning you will not need the extra logic to stop the timer.