Best way to be able to pick multiple colors/designs of symbols dynamically from flash

Question

Sorry the title's so convoluted... I must've tried for ten minutes to get a good, descriptive title! Basically, here's the scenario.

Let's say a user can pick fifty different hat colors and styles to put on an avatar. The avatar can move his head around, so we'd need the same types of movements in the symbol for when that happens.

Additionally, it gets which hat should be on the 'avatar' from a database. The problem is that we can't just make 50 different frames with a different hat on each. And each hat symbol will have the same movements, it'll just be different styles, colors and sizes.

So how can I make one variable that is the HAT, that way we can just put the appropriate hat symbol into the variable and always be able to call Hat.gotoAndplay('tip_hat') or any other generic functions.... Does that make sense?

Hope that's not too confusing. Sorry, I'm not great at the visual Flash stuff, but it's gotta be done! Thanks!

Answer 1

debu's suggestion about a hat container makes sense in order to separate out control of the hat movement.

You could take this further by separating out different aspects of the appearance of each hat (not just the colours, but also style, pattern, size, orientation etc) - this would allow you produce a wide variety of different hats from just a few parameters.

So for example 6 styles x 4 patterns x 8 colours = 192 different hats (without having to draw each one!)

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