How to Make a Simple Mouse Shooting Game in Flash 8 - Page 3

Sight

Shooting games get more interesting the more it looks like you are actually shooting something, instead of just pressing a key or clicking. As you may know, most real guns have sights for aiming, and when you look through the sight you usually see a cirlce with two diameters shown, on vertical and one horizontal. Most shooting games use this as the aimer/pointer in the game. Flash has the capability of changing the mouse pointer into a new shape. Take the sight movie clip you created earlier and draw whatever you want the pointer to be in the game, I made mine a red circle with two lines through it, as described above. It's best if the sight is only one frame long. Then, in the main timeline of Scene 1 in a layer named "pointer", drag the pointer onto the stage. Make sure that it is not in the white area of the stage which is seen. Name the pointer instance "cursor_mc" (with the cursor selected, enter "cursor_mc" in the Instance Name section of the properties inspector, bottom of screen. This lets us acces the cursor via ActionScript code). If you haven't already done so, make a new layer named "actions" (it makes the game more tidy). Select the keyframe in frame 1 of the actions layer and enter this code into the actions panel (to open actions panel, press F9 or Window>Actions):

Mouse.hide(); cursor_mc.onMouseMove = function() { this._x = _xmouse; this._y = _ymouse; updateAfterEvent(); };

here's what the code does: It first hides the mouse pointer so that you don't see it anymore. Then it makes a function which is defined as when the mouse moves. Next, it sets the position of the sight image to the mouse's position, and then updates the movie/game. Now, whenever you put your mouse in the game when it is playing, the mouse turns into the sighter shape you drew.