[F8-Help] hitTest with undefined element

[SnailsAnimation]

Hi,
I'm creating a shooting game in wich all the enemies are called enemy1, enemy2, enemy3, etc. (in one level I can have 100+ enemies) Now, I need to do a hitTest detecting if a bullet hits any of these enemies and remembers wich enemy has been hit, so this enemy can be hurt.

This code was working well (on the bullet mc):

onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
//supposing 10 is the maximum number of enemies
for(i=0;i<=10;i++){

if (this.hitTest(_root["enemy" + i]))
{_root["enemy" + i].gotoAndPlay("hurt");}

}
}

It works well if i <= "a small number" but if I put a big number like 100, it's too laggy, considering the bullets are duplicated and they all run this loop over and over. So I need another alternative.

Maybe if I create an array containing "enemy1", "enemy2", etc. and it could detect if the bullet hit any element in the array? but how do I do that?

Thank you.

[ImprisonedPride]

Create a new mc: enemies.
When creating enemies, attach them to the enemies mc.
Have each bullet check to see if it hits the enemies mc. If it does, then and ONLY then, cycle through the enemies array.

You can also optimize this by splitting the play area into columns, rows, quadrants, etc to cut down the checking algorithm.