[CS3, AS2] masking with actionscript

[bluekronos]

Hi guys
I'll try to explain this the best I can...

I'm making a tower defense game that shows the ranges of the towers depicted by red alphaed circles when they are selected (so these circles would be turning off and on depending on which towers were selected)
unfortunately, since the circles overlap, if you select enough towers, the whole screen turns red, and you can't see anything under the circles' layer. So I thought I'd attach all those red circles to a single movie clip, and have THAT be a mask for a single flat alphaed red color. unfortunately flash starts blowing up at that point and gives me weird shapes of alphaed red. does anyone have any experience with what I'm talking about? and possible know of a workaround?

[deepakflash]

can't really get your point, but let me guess- if you are trying to mask your mc's with another mc through AS, then just write

redballs_mc.setMask(masking_mc);

you can have all your red balls inside a movieclip named redballs_mc and then mask this MC with a masker MovieClip named masking_mc

So all your balls are restricted within this "masking_mc"

[bluekronos]

yeah I did that, but since I'm turning the visibility off and on of the movie clips inside the mask, flash is displaying them incorrectly. it's a pain, but I fixed the problem by completely removing the movie clips when I need to turn them off and reattaching when I need to turn them on, instead of toggling visibility