Create
a PongOut Game
        by Ilyas Usal aka pom : 3 January 2005

As you probably know already, there are many ways to detect a collision with Flash. Flash has a built-in method, called hitTest, that has 2 different syntaxes, which are both described in the AS dictionary:

myMovieClip.hitTest(target) // clip - clip collision
myMovieClip.hitTest(x, y, shapeFlag) // point - clip collision

If you've ever tried to use this method, you certainly realized its limitations: the first one can only detect a collision between the bounding boxes of 2 clips (the blue square around a clip), which proves totally inefficient if the clips are not rectangles (for instance, 2 circles, or 2 lines) as demonstrated on this little drawing of mine:

You can see that in this situation, Flash will detect a non-existent collision.

The second syntax gives more accurate results, but it can only be used to detect the collision between a clip and a point in space, which is usually not what we're trying to detect.

There is an additional problem with the hitTest method. I call it the Where-did-my-hitTest-go? problem. Let's say we're trying to know whether a circle has touched a wall, symbolized by a vertical line:

You can see in this highly artistic picture that there is no physical collision between the circle and the line within a frame, even though the circle did go through the wall. That's because hitTest is frame-dependent. Fortunately, there are ways to solve this, or at least to make so that it doesn't bother us too much in the making of our game. Enough talk, here comes the fun part.

The Game
The first thing we are going to make is a simplified version of Pong, without an opponent. Here is an example of the pone game that you can test out:

[ an example of the pong game you will create ]

If you open the first source provided, called pong_00.fla, you'll notice there are 2 layers:

  • code, that contains a single include instruction

  • objects, that contains a bar symbol called bar and a ball symbol called ball.

Some of you may not be familiar with the #include instruction. It allows you to edit your code with your favorite text editor, like Scite|Flash, or SE|PY, rather than the Flash action panel. It's a matter of taste, but I strongly encourage you to try them, you won't be disappointed. Of course, if you choose not to use them, you'll have to remove the #include statement and paste the code directly in Flash.

In order to keep the code as clean and easy to update as possible, we are going to write very simple classes for our game. Nothing to worry about, you don't have to have mad OOP skillz to understand the Actionscript of this game.

On the next page, I'll introduce the game class and related code!


 

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