Breakout - A little starting trouble

Hey everyone :)

Im in the game making part of Flash as it is a great way to learn alot of different methods of doing things as well as learning new Actionscript , and also because you have something impressive to show once your done


Well a little while ago I came across a tutorial here on Flashkit that showed me how to make the basic engine for the Classic Breakout game, though the author of the tutorial's english wasnt all that great, I was still able to piece it together


Now Im running into a problem (I have attached the .fla)


1) I have three walls which are each a seperate movieclip (left, top, right) and each has the code in it that checks for a hittest with the ball

2) I have a unseen Movieclip (the black ball on the outside left of the stage) that controls the direction of the ball
Basically in this movieclip 'moving', there are four different frames each with its own movieclip

3) Each of these 4 seperate movieclips contains the code
tellTarget (_root._root.ball) {
_x -= 10;
_y -= 10;
}
Except the + and - are arranged differently depending on which direction the ball will be moving


To help you I will tell you which frame inside the movieclip 'moving' moves the ball in which direction

Frame 1 = Up-Left
Frame 2 = Down-Left
Frame 3 = Up-Right
Frame 4 = Down-Right



Now I tried going about this by having a variable 'direction' inside the 'moving' movieclip that begins at one since the ball starts in the Up-Left moving direction

Everytime it hits the wall or the paddle, it checks to see what value this direction variable can be (1,2,3 or 4). Depending on which it is, it'll go to the different frames in the moving movieclip


When I run the program it works (try) except for when it goes Down-Right and hits the right wall, for some reason it will just go right through it


Anyways, sorry for the length thread and hopefully it will make sense. If not, perhaps you can make sense of my .fla

Thanks everyone, hopefully you can help :)

the code in your LEFT wall is:

Code:

---

        if (this.hitTest(_root.ball)) {
                if (_root.moving.direction == 1) {
                        _root.moving.gotoAndPlay(3);
                        _root.moving.direction = 3;
                }
        } else if (_root.moving.direction == 2) {
                _root.moving.gotoAndPlay(4);
                _root.moving.direction = 4;
        }

---

while it should be:

Code:

---

        if (this.hitTest(_root.ball)) {
                if (_root.moving.direction == 1) {
                        _root.moving.gotoAndPlay(3);
                        _root.moving.direction = 3;
                } else if (_root.moving.direction == 2) {
                        _root.moving.gotoAndPlay(4);
                        _root.moving.direction = 4;
                }
        }

---

Basically else statement has been written for wrong if statement so whenever direction was changed to 2 this code changed it straight back to 4.

If I may say so, this is not good way to go with breakout game. Not only is the code spread all over the place, but it does not allow you to change the movement at all to any other angle then 45 degrees.

Haha *embarrased*

Thanks tony, I also though about the whole angle thing and I dont know how I would go about changing it

The way it is now wont really work in the end since it will ALWAYS do the same thing no matter how hard you try, where as with angles it would be whole different story

Anyways, thanks again ... I guess that tutorial I found really wasnt a good one haha

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~ee03mjb/resource.htm

try here for a tilebased source example =)

Hey

mbenney, thanks so much for the link, Ive checked it out and it appears to be exactly what I want

I suppose the best way to learn is to reverse engineering something your attempting to make, so you know how to go about doing it next time around

Thanks again :)