I'll try to do a better job of explaining what I mean.
EDIT: In rereading your last post whitebabylon I know this solution doesn't get you exactly where you need to be. I know you want to have a "moving left" animation (as well as other animations for the other directions) For now I just wanted to get you to the point where your "guy" at least faces the way he is moving. Then I can help you take the next step.
Ok let's go to frame 1 of your main timeline in the Guy layer:
Ok so your character or "guy" as you call him. Is he a movie clip? If he isn't select him and hit F8 to convert him into one. Call the movieclip guy. Ok so now on the stage on the Guy layer you have an instance of the guy movieclip. Click this movieclip once and go to the properties panel. Set the instance name to myCharacter.
You can now reference this character as a movieclip in actionscript (which we will need to do). He isn't ready yet though! Ok now look in your library, you should see a movieclip called guy which you just created. Double click the icon next to guy to open up the movie clip in the symbol editor. (this looks exactly the same as the editor for the main timeline) The way you'll know that you are editing a symbol can be seen in this screenshot of my current project. See where the cursor is and how it says Scene1 -> ButtonTravelLog. In this screenshot I am editing a movieclip symbol named ButtonTravelLog. Each movieclip you create in your library can have it's own timeline and animations independent of the main timeline... but to avoid confusing you and to keep it simple just know that to edit a movie clip you double click it's icon in the library and to get back to the main stage click Scene 1 (as show in the screenshot)
So in your case when you double click the movieclip named guy in the library your flash screen should say Scene 1 -> guy where the cursor is in my screenshot. Take a look at the screenshot again, see how I have an actions layer and notice how in the timeline there are the tiny words "in" and "out". These are frame labels. They allow you to reference specific animations within your movieclip from actionscript. So what you could do is have two layers. One called actions, one called guyAnimations. See this screenshot:
What you would do is create 4 keyframes for the actions layer and 4 keyframes for the guyAnimations layer. Once you have done that, in the actions layer click each new keyframe you created and then, as shown in the screenshot give each frame a meaningful label in the properties panel. I labeled the first one right, the second left, the third up, and the fourth down. Then in the guyAnimations layer you'll place a copy of the image that represents that direction. (Frame 1 = image of the guy facing right, Frame 2 = image of the guy facing left, etc) Once you've done that, save your project and click Scene 1 to go back to the main stage. Open up your actions panel where you have placed your actionscript code and do the following:
ActionScript Code:
onClipEvent(enterFrame) {
if (Key.isDown(Key.LEFT)) {
_x--;
myCharacter.gotoAndStop("left"); }
if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT)) {
_x++;
myCharacter.gotoAndStop("right"); }
if (Key.isDown(Key.UP)) {
_y--;
myCharacter.gotoAndStop("up"); }
if (Key.isDown(Key.DOWN)) {
_y++;
myCharacter.gotoAndStop("down"); }
}
What this says is, when I press the left key, take the instance of my guy class on the stage which is called myCharacter and within that movieclip go to the frame labeled "left" and play JUST that frame. Since the guyAnimations layer within that movieclip AT that location shows the character facing left, that is the image that will be displayed. Does that make more sense?
NOTE: There is no actionscript code inside your guy movieclip just frame labels!
NOTE: In your main timeline for your fla be sure to ONLY put actionscript code in the first frame of a specific layer named actions, scripts, or something of that nature. Otherwise finding your code will be a real pain later!
[AS3] move a direction +picture change
Linear Mode
