how to access a different movieclip within the flash in AS3

Question

I've been trying to learn Action Script 3 the past few weeks, making tiny interactive games to learn the basics. I stumble upon a problem every now and then but most of the times google helps me out.

But this problem has got me stuck so please help:

The main stage contains two objects(movieclips), the player and a wall. The player has got his own code so when I drag in the player object I don't have to write any code into the main stage to be able to move the player.

This all worked pretty well and I now wanted to add the wall so the player actually has something to bounce into.

Now here is the problem, I want to check if the player touches the wall, I've done this before but that was when I used the main stage as my coding playground instead of putting the code in movieclips. How can I check if the player hits the wall within the movement code of the player object?

Answer 1

There are many ways to access your objects, here is one possible solution:

var wall:MovieClip = this.parent.getChildByName("wall") as MovieClip;

I presume that you have a player movieClip, added to stage directly (no containers) and the code goes inside this object. Wall object must have the instance name of "wall".

EDIT: about the collision you can do it using hitTestObject, example:

var wall:MovieClip = this.parent.getChildByName("wall") as MovieClip;
trace("check collision: "+this.hitTestObject(wall));