Pausing between lines of actionscript

Question

Here's what I want to do in code. Animate an MC of a car for a duration of x seconds. After the car is done, move an MC of a dog for y seconds. And so on...

With this code, all animations execute simultaneously.

car.slideTo(200,100,1);
dog.slideTo(200,100,5);
blimp.slideTo(200,100,2);

...

Is it possible to write a pause function to put in between those lines? I've tried using getTimeout, but I want to avoid having to define each animation as a separate function.

Answer 1

You can try using setInterval(my_func, 1000), which calls my_func after a 1 second.

Answer 2

Hi, I strongly advice you to use TweenMax http://blog.greensock.com/tweenmaxas3/

It has all the animation tweening functions that you can dream of, including pausing in the middle of code.

It's also super easy to use, e.g.

import gs.TweenMax;
// move the movieclip to (500,200) in 2 seconds:
var myTween:TweenMax = new TweenMax(mc, 2, {x:500, y:200});

and you can pause it anytime like

myTween.pause();

But in your case you probably want to queue up your tweens

So you can write like

import gs.*;

var tween1:TweenMax = new TweenMax(mc1, 1, {x:300,y:400});
var tween2:TweenMax = new TweenMax(mc2, 1, {x:200,y:400});
var tween3:TweenMax = new TweenMax(mc3, 1, {x:100,y:400});

var myGroup:TweenGroup = new TweenGroup([tween1, tween2, tween3]);
myGroup.align = TweenGroup.ALIGN_SEQUENCE;

Also, TweenMax & Tweensy are currently the fastest tweening libraries existed in AS3, but TweenMax is a bit easier to use in my opinion, comparison between different tweening engines here http://blog.greensock.com/tweening-speed-test/

Answer 3

You might want to use SetInterval().

Here is a simple example that might help:

var Timer = setInterval(delay, 500); //calls the function delay after 500 milliseconds

function delay () {
    trace("delayed!");
    clearInterval(Timer); //stops the function from being called again
}

Answer 4

Your question more or less exposes a misunderstanding of how ActionScript works. When Flash is executing your contents, what it does is: first it runs all your frame scripts, then it advances your animations by one frame, then it updates the screen. Then it runs all the scripts on the next frame, then it advances the animations again, then it updates the screens.

So if you put in some kind of pause function between two lines of code, Flash would do nothing at all during the pause, because it's still trying to finish up that set of frame scripts. Then once the pauses were finished, then Flash would finally update the screen, so all three animations would still work at the same time.

It might seem like a pain, but getTimeout is what you should be using. Or, you can also use a tween library that includes a feature to delay the start of the tween, such as the one presented in Unreality's answer. Underneath it amounts to the same thing.