Calling a random movie clip

[netfuel]

Ok, I need to call a random movie clip out of say 10 clips to be displayed in a seqence every time the swf is loaded. Anybody got a script or tutorial? I'm new to this whole actionscript thing.

[falltimemusic]

you can do it the quick and dirty way or a more difficult way.

the easy way:

have each frame contain another MC.

then to randomly select, do this

stop();

//this assumes you have 5 different frames with different MCs.
//You can have as many as you like.
whatMC = random(5)+1;

gotoAndStop(whatMC);

the hard way (im only going to post the code if you ask for it) you would have to dynamically create a random MC out of the library. This could be useful in some cases, but probably wont really be necessary for what you are looking to do.

[Suzaku7]

HI I was using code just like your quick way and I was having trouble with once it was embedded into the html page it would not load and play thru and start the random script.
I was curious if you ran into this problem, and if so how did you solve it.
I woudl also be intrested in seeing the hard way you mentioned.

[Artech]

The seperate frame solution is viable. However, there is another option that is similar in it's simplicity.

Say for example you have 10 MC's, named MC1, MC2... MC10.

You can access them by using brackets.

if you were to do this:

targetme = _root["MC" + (random(10) + 1)];

the variable targetme would then, basically, become a random one of those movieclips to which you can duplicate, delete, move, make invisible, whatever. In doing so it affects the origional movie clip.

Lets say the random(10) came out 5 (add 1 because random(10) is 0-9) and we typed

targetme._visible = false;

MC6 would then become invisible, or could be duplicated, or whatever you needed to do.

Brian

[Suzaku7]

placement as always been hard for me to get for the code. Would that go in the same spot has the code I was already using?

cause yeah optimally I would want to be able to remove the movieclip that was called randomly until all were used then have it start all over again.

[coskier]

To set this up then, should this work?

_root["MC0"]._visible = false;
_root["MC1"]._visible = false;
_root["MC2"]._visible = false;
_root["MC3"]._visible = false;

targetme = _root["MC" + (random(4))];
targetme._visible = true;

[sophistikat]

// create a list of our movieclips
var mc_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
 
// create shuffle function
function shuffle() {
    return Math.floor(Math.random() * 2);
}
 
// shuffle our array
mc_list.sort(shuffle);
 
// i don't get what you want to do afterwards
// but the array got shuffled to something like 8, 9, 4, 2 ,10, 1, 3, 5, 7, 6
// the following attaches 10 movieclips named mymc1-10 in the random order
var mc_length = mc_list.length;
for (var i = 0; i < mc_length; i++) {
    this.attachMovie("mymc" + mc_list[i], "mymc" + mc_list[i], i);
}

EDIT: shuffle script comes from senocular.... i think