The key word here is static. I'm guessing you didn't declare it as such, and if you don't then you need to instantiate the class (and with it the const) before you can access it. Usually I define consts as static, they tend to be more useful that way and take up less memory.

Also, make sure it's public. Just in case.

Among other things, this inspired me to get back to a document I've been working on on and off. Thanks 
I know I should be prototyping this while I document it, but I think there's one other project I have to work on first... good advice though.
Also, if anyone wants to document their game and ISN'T working in a team, may I recommend Tiddlywiki? It's been a great help in organizing my thoughts. (Actually, I think it can be used for collaborative websites as well, but I'm not sure how well it works for that)

It's unfortunate that my current personal project uses tons of rotation, making bitmap caching largely infeasible

I think Braid's craploads of semi-transparent particle effects would rape Flash pretty hard.

◕ . ◕

Why have you deemed it necessary to create a Hitler emote?

Quick note: Mosquitoes account for more human fatalities than any other animal on the planet. No human should feel the slightest bit guilty for killing one.

Ahh, I can taste the delicious pain of this cow.

I actually have said pretty much this exactly. Suffering is delicious; maybe not directly, but if something lived a horrible live there's a good chance it's delicious.

I bet orphan is scrumptious.

edit: Hey, is anyone else imagining teenagers competing to eat kittens whole now?

I'd say just set the ban to expire in a year. Can always ban him again if he still deserves it.

No, if you zoom in on his buttcrack there's like a pixel of thong.

If you look close enough, it's actually an orange speedo, which blends in with his skin.

Don't ask me why I looked closely.

I think both corpus and Skofo told us more about themselves than they meant to...
And more than we wanted to know.

Let go of what? I have no problems with being banned from the IRC channel.

Oh okay then.
</discussion>

Haha, what on earth is that log? It isn't even relevant.

It is relavent.

MASTER OF DEBATE  :D

Seriously though, everyone here telling you to let it go really have your best interests at heart. The sooner you stop flipping out and listen to people, the sooner we can have a productive discussion.

Jesus Skofo, like 90% of that log was me and Sii talking to Andy; how is that provoking you?
Srsly, let it go. If you learn to relax a little you might even get back into IRC someday, but at this rate it's like you're trying to get banned from the forums too.

It seems to me like the really hard part would be making the animations, rather than making the code to animate things. Actually, for a game I'm planning, I'd need to have a system like this for the protagonist, and figuring it out has been a REAL sticking point.
edit: Although, now that I think about it, I may have been making it more difficult than it needs to be

And it's really useful, but too many people abuse it by doing it constantly without realizing it.

You seem to know your stuff, what would you say the most common such mistakes are? 

I'll put one together later, though I think that what you're saying is pretty close; I do know that rotating sprites tends to have much the same effect, but I don't think Flash's standard sub-pixel movement stuff does. I don't know, I freely admit not being an expert in the nuts and bolts of it, but I do seem to notice substantial slowdown whenever I see a sprite with in-between alpha values.

- Every display object has an alpha property. You can set it to any value in between 0 and 1. The CPU usuage of this would be the equivalent of moving it 1 pixel (roughly) so it definitely isn't particularly slow. (...Or what Gnarf said)

Changing alpha isn't slow, but using alpha values between 0 and 1 is DRASTICALLY slower than using either of them. At one point, I had a semi-transparent mini-map in a game, and it completely wrecked the frame-rate. Now, admittedly, there were some other very unoptimized bits that were probably bogging crap down as well, but I've read in several books(and IRC an SDL tutorial talking about software rendering of alpha values) that alpha values are slow. I tend to believe it.

could that be done without creating an animation strip of png files?

Yeah each display object has an alpha value; the only problem is that animating alphas with no hardware acceleration can be REALLY slow, so I guess it depends on how good the hardware support in Flash 10 actually is.

Sure it can. You can grab a ByteArray off of a URLLoader or an embedded asset, and parse it however you like.

Neat! I'll have to look into that.

For instance, afaik, Flash doesn't support transparency, additive blending, or even hardware acceleration, whereas GM does.

Flash supports transparency in png files, and I think you can set blend modes on display objects once you have them in.
I believe the hardware acceleration was also supposed to be expanded in Flash 10, but I don't know to what degree.

Ahem... back to the topic.
Personally, I try to avoid Flash (the program) whenever possible, and work entirely from Flex or Flashdevelop (depending upon the project). I think the Flash authoring tool is a great program for animations and an absolutely wretched one for scripting.

Also, if you're going to be doing a lot of AS animations I'd recommend grabbing tweener from the list posted earlier. It's incredibly useful, and with a small amount of effort you can create some really nice looking and entirely programmatic animations.

Like everyone else says, AS3 is far superior, particularly for games programming.

Also, if one were to, say, create an engine and shell in Flash but load individual enemy data (sprites, possibly behavior and such) and possibly maps from outside folders or a database of some sort, would this relieve the problem some? Would it even be possible?

To some degree. AFAIK Flash is somewhat limited in terms of the kinds of files it can parse. Image data, swfs, mp3s, and xml files are all okay; anything else, maybe not so much. It's possible to create your game data in those formats, but it's certainly not as open ended as being able to parse binary data however you want.
Setting up a dynamic loader like that would be the way you'd want to do it for a project of any size though.

What I'm really asking, though, is whether or not Flash is simple enough to make games in (once I know Actionscript, of course) that it's worth the effort to learn, assuming hobby games is what I plan to do in it.

I think so. I believe Flash makes it a lot more feasible to try to make a profit off of small scale games. I wouldn't use it to create a huge RPG, but for a shmup or puzzle game it would be a great medium.

Seriously, no one's posted this yet?

Oh, and even weirder that no one's posted this: