KCMcG Studios

So I’ve learned a valuable lesson when it comes to flash code and code encryption software. Don’t use the default “stage” variable outside of the initialization function.

So for those of you not familiar with flash, the screen that is displayed when you open something in flash is called the “stage”. It is created automatically when code is compiled and everything that shows up on the screen has to be added as a child of the stage. So if you want 3 airplanes to appear on the screen your function call should look something like this:

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
stage.addChild(tempAirplane);

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
stage.addChild(tempAirplane);

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
stage.addChild(tempAirplane);

Encrypting your code is a necessary step when publishing a flash game, otherwise anyone could copy your flash game, decompile it, and change whatever details they wanted to pass the game off as their own. Unfortunately, when the code is encrypted some things may break. In the case of Kindisoft’s secureSWF, almost all references to the stage become broken. The only things that seem to be left intact are those in the initialization function that’s called the first time the stage is created. So keyboard events created during that time will stay intact and any children added to the stage at that time will be added, but from there on out, you will need to rely on adding children to the objects added during the initialization function. So I added a “stageSprite” object and then added everything else to that. My new calls to add objects look like this:

stage.addChild(stageSprite);
stageSprite.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, enterFrame);
stageSprite.addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_LEAVE, mouseLeaving);
stageSprite.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, mouseEntering);
stageSprite.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, onClick);
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, keyPressed);
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyReleased);

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
Main.stageSprite.addChild(tempAirplane);

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
Main.stageSprite.addChild(tempAirplane);

tempAirplane = new Airplane();
Main.stageSprite.addChild(tempAirplane);

Before the changes, my action menu stopped appearing when a unit was clicked and my onClick functions to select a target to move or attack stopped working. Post changes, everything seems to work great. Now that it’s working online with the code encryption I can start working on new things. Next step is creating a navigation menu to actually allow multiple maps to be selected from (right now it only loads one map that can be played endlessly). I also need to design a company logo to appear when the game loads. Any ideas for maps that might be fun?