Gimmick 2022-01-01 14:57:16

Hey dude, I received your PM (commenting here as my outbox is full - delete this comment if you like). The code looks about right. One thing I can suggest is removing the "depth" variables like "guts" and "skull", as you can replace that with, say, "enemyDepth + 1000" and "enemyDepth + 2000" and it'd be equivalent.

You could also create a new thread in the game dev forum, as that can get more specific replies than if, say, the reg lounge thread or PMs were used directly.

Gimmick 2022-01-03 12:19:48

@Nabella Depends on what kind of questions they are. Specific questions would be better off in their own thread, for example if it's related to a game that you're making and cannot be generalized. On the other hand if it's general questions about AS2 then those could all be part of the same thread.

By the way, I assume you've seen the AS:Main thread from 2006-8 or so? There's a lot of good resources over there for learning AS2 even though quite a few links are dead by now.

Gimmick 2022-01-04 03:47:32

@Nabella Fair enough! Different people learn differently, some prefer videos, others prefer books, others prefer decompiling and trying to interpret others' code themselves, yet others learn from changing things randomly and recompiling until they get the result they want, and seeing why it worked.

As long as it works for you, great! When I was first learning AS2, I used a combination of all the above four methods, although I initially started with doing the last one (tweaking things randomly) a LOT and then decompiling others' code (usually tutorial code) and finally going to videos and then books.

At some point you might want to try going through a book like Learning Actionscript 2.0 (https://stargate.inf.elte.hu/~pepe/Forrai/webprog/szerzoi/flash_as2_learning.pdf) and/or any API documentation (https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/flash/ActionScript2Reference.pdf) and searching for the function or the description of the thing you're trying to do. You needn't power through it if you get confused, but just going through it like light reading would do a lot to get you accustomed to going through it, and as you get comfortable with the more advanced aspects of the language (e.g. through videos), it might become easier to use the documentation directly.

Another thing you could do is learn a more beginner-friendly language like Python 3 (for which there are umpteens of resources) and then try and port whatever concepts you learned to AS2. That might end up being easier, given that a lot of AS2 resources these days are obsolete or not fully maintained.

Gimmick 2022-01-06 11:11:15

@Nabella glad to help! Also, pay it forward when you can - another way of learning that I didn't mention earlier is to attempt to answer any questions that you can. Even if they're not entirely correct, someone else will likely correct it and you'll be able to easily see and correct any gaps in your knowledge.

It does take a bit of confidence to be able to answer even if you don't know the answer fully, but once you get over that mental barrier, you'll find you're improving much faster, especially since questions that other people ask are likely to be outside of your comfort zone, so answering them would be taking you out of it at the same time.

Given that the flash forward jam has been announced again this year, we may* see an influx of users posting questions on AS2 in the game dev forum. If this is the case, then we'll need all the help we could get ;)

*I say "may" because I've been trying to advertise the game dev forum in connection with the jam, but most people don't really use it at the moment.