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Introduction
Grids are wonderful. Starting with a grid, you can achieve so many tremendous effects that it
would be a shame to ignore them any longer.
The only thing you'll need at first is a good understanding of the for loops, so I'll
talk a little bit about them. You'll also need to know how to duplicate a movie clip, so if you
don't know how to do that, check Kirupa's tutorial.
for loops
for loops are used when you want a certain number of statements to be executed a
given number of times. The basic structure is:
for(init; condition; next)
{
statement(s);
}
init is almost all the time a variable declaration. Generally, you create a
new variable and give it the value 0. condition is, well, the condition that Flash will check before executing
the code. next is what Flash will do once all the statements have been executed. It
(almost) always increments the init variable.
init is a variable initialization, var i=0. Now i
will be the variable that will tell us when we have executed the code 10 times. So when
the loop is over, we have to increment it by 1. This gives us the next:
i++. Finally, the condition we have to check is whether i
is bigger than 10 or not.
for (var i=0;i < 10;i++)
The complete code could be something like this:
myVar=5;
for (var i=0;i < 10;i++)
{
myVar++;
}
trace (myVar);
// returns 15
Building the grid:
[ the grid we're talking about ]
gridx=30;
for (var i=0;i < 10;i++)
{
dot.duplicateMovieClip("dot"+i,i);
mc=this["dot"+i];
mc._x=gridx*i;
}
dot._visible=0;
initClip article in this section.gridx which refers to the width of 1 cell of our grid.
Then we duplicate the dot movie clip under the name "dot"+i and we
move it to the correct location. Finally we make the main movie clip invisible, but this is not
necessary._x into _y
to obtain a vertical series of duplicates._y
axis.
gridx=30;
gridy=30;
num=0;
for (var i=0;i < 10;i++)
{
for (var j=0;j < 10;j++)
{
dot.duplicateMovieClip("dot"+num,num);
mc=this["dot"+num];
mc._x=gridx*i;
mc._y=gridy*j;
num++;
}
}
dot._visible=0;
The j loop creates a vertical series of duplicates, and the i loop
'duplicates' it at various _x positions.
num, to be able to give a unique name and a unique depth to my duplicates. It can
also be useful in various effects, but I leave this for you to discover...Just a final word before we wrap up. What you've seen here is freshly baked content without added preservatives, artificial intelligence, ads, and algorithm-driven doodads. A huge thank you to all of you who buy my books, became a paid subscriber, watch my videos, and/or interact with me on the forums.
Your support keeps this site going! 😇
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