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[cmspice]

So I have some experience in the old flash and it's been a while and now I'm a lot more experienced in other programming languages but really haven't even touched flash since.

Point: I want to make a flash game. The old flash stuff I learned is not only obsolete but also very inefficient. It all involved this gross combination of using the flash gui and actionscript together making for very bad, hard to change, not versatile and inefficient code.

I can't imagine it being even possible to make a game like this. Unfortunately, all the flash tutorials I find teach how to program in this way.

Of course, I'd still like to be able to make use of movie clips and the other bells and whistles of flash since it makes animation and other things A LOT easier. I'd just rather keep the dynamic things (like say, enemy generation, bullet generation, hit detection, level transitions, menus etc...) completely separate.

I want to use flash kinda like how I'm using SDL right now. Where sdl/flash only handles the drawing and I control everything else in the code.

So I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of tutorial/book/reference that shows how to use flash in this way. It's particularly hard for me to use flash in this way without a guide since actionscript is sorta embedded in that gui.

Thanks in advance.

[Don Andy]

http://www.gotoandplay.it/_articles/2006/07/as3intro.php

You could try and get a foodhold in the whole AS3 thing with that. I myself have mostly been looking for "AS3 game tutorial" on google most of the time.
gotoAndPlay is a pretty good resource by itself, though.

I found that most AS3 tutorials out there draw most of the stuff on runtime, directly from the library, so that may be what you're looking for.

And maybe some general tutorials on AS3, to get the whole OOP thing down. It took me some getting used to.

[grapefrukt]

Damn. I really should write a few tutorials about this, there seems to be a big demand for them but no real resource that delivers more than a quick overview.
I will consider it.

[joshg]

I had a similar problem just trying to wrap my head around using AS2.0 to make a game, since all the game tutorials were using AS1.0 style code.

Thing is, I finally came to the conclusion that part of the reason is that I was seriously leaning towards over-engineering my code, whereas the game dev tutorials were about fast prototyping and getting the game working as quickly as possible.  Which, for a game with a single coder and no real expectation of code reuse, is perfectly fine.  So eventually I realized that even if I still prefer to code with a bit more structure than some of these guys, I could learn something from them anyway and try to tone down my over-engineering tendency.

The other thing is, there's a LOT of stuff you can do to organize a game by manipulating the Flash GUI / timeline that, while weird to a non-Flash coder, is by no means inefficient.  Layering MovieClips together is a great way to organize sprites, for example.  Now, a lot of the AS1.0 style tutorials will scatter their code all over the place in movieclips, different spots on the timeline, etc, and that does make things a nightmare to debug and track revisions.  But you can avoid that while still making good use of the timeline and movieclip structure; just label everything and then you can access it from code that you import at a single point in the root timeline.

[ninjascience]

Yeah, if you don't like working in the Flash IDE look into FlexBuilder or FDT. 

http://fdt.powerflasher.com/

[cmspice]

Yeah, if you don't like working in the Flash IDE look into FlexBuilder or FDT. 

http://fdt.powerflasher.com/

Well there some parts of the flash IDE I'd hate to be without like say, layering movieclips for sprites. I haven't really touched any of the third party flash stuff. Are they worth it? Like, how do you go about creating movie clips and SVG (vector graphics) and whatnot. I don't see anything getting much better than flash as far as managing movieclips and certain timeline things and I'm impartial to any of the actionscript editting options that might be included as long as I'm able to organize my actionscript within one centralized area and not-spread out through 20 billion movieclips D:.

Well thanks for the help everyone. I'm gonna poke around at gotoandPlay and google some more. See where that gets me.

Grapfrukt: that would be pretty awesome. Even maybe just a nice clean example. The syntax wont take me too long to pickup. The main problem I'm having is that flash isn't like a traditional IDE with source files that you run directly. All the source is run from the timeline and I have no idea how to go about integrating the structure of code in the timeline with structured code in source files so to speak. Always ends up a big mess for me.

[X-Tender]

I think you have the wrong impression how to code in flash.
Specially with AS3 you doesn't need the Timeline anymore (maybe just to create animations)

I just use 1 Frame and the Document class. Everything gets attached on the Scene when i Need itfrom the Library.

www.gotoandlearn.com is also a very good resource for AS3 Coding introductions.