Comments on: gotoAndStop in AS3

By: antonio brandao

antonio brandao — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:34:29 +0000

Funny, been programming AS3 since it came out, and I never needed “gotoAndStop()”, I never even thought about it.

Today a friend of mine asked me how to do it, and I landed on this page.

…why even use this ?? My advice is leave this behind, choose a better approach through wiser coding.

By: Baaz

Baaz — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:31:47 +0000

I am working with flash for 8 years now and so far loved the simplicity of turning rich photoshop content into an amazing world of interactivity.

I agree that as3 obviously has become more “professional” in terms of programming, script-interaction and whatever. Anyway the question is: Do all the new and changed features support my daily work? “gotoAndStop” for instance – if I now need about 7 lines of code instead of one, the answer clearly is NO it does not!

Flash in my opinion always has been a tool for designers. The so called “limitations” of flash until now only proof that it was not supposed to be a tool for developers. Adobe simply changed the target group.

If I as the initial target group would have wanted to know everything what a developer knows, I would have not become a designer

So in my opinion: People will stick to as2 as long as possible, catalyst creates a new market for interested people and as3 creates a new market for developers. at the end, adobe wins. however.. nice marketing.

By: antonio brandao

antonio brandao — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:02:00 +0000

This is a silly discussion. If you designers liked Flash before, well why not now? All the old features remain there! Anyone who dislikes AS3 can still use AS2 ou even AS1. There is the timeline with it’s classic tweens. Nothing has gone away. They just added a new possibility of code. So what’s the problem ?

By the way, Adobe has a new solution for designers, it’s called Flash Catalyst.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

AS3 is the result of public demand for greater performance. Naturally only experienced coders can build complex code. So if you’re a designer who wants to code little, stick to AS2.

If you’re a designer interested in great performance, you can use Flash Catalyst and get a good coder to finish up your app. Or learn.. knowledge isn’t painful.

& stop complaining

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:42:42 +0000

I think the problem lies within the progression of flash. It started as an animation platform with limited scripting, then as it became used more for interactive pieces they started piling on functionality to a structure that really wasn’t meant to handle it. AS3 is a much more robust and mature programming environment than AS2. As a developer it’s a relief, for years I’ve been tasked with trying to create complex flash applications and it gets very messy quickly with AS2, for the first time I’m actually feeling like things are getting done the right way, I’m having fewer bugs, and I’m able to much more rapidly change functionality. I understand that designers don’t like this, but you have to look at it from a different perspective. As a coder, making timeline animations and creating complex assets in flash is very frustrating and tedious. I think what Adobe has done is said let’s give good animation and asset creation tools to the designers, and finally give the developers a good programming language to work with.

By: mk

mk — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:32:01 +0000

Jim has it exactly backwards. It’s the programmers who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a design and animation program like Flash. You should be writing easy to use, well documented classes that do exactly what the designers need and staying as far away as possible from anything to do with GUIs or interactivity.

By: gludion

gludion — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:39:38 +0000

One important – but unfortunate – fact is that as3 has been designed, and tested by developpers. As a result, many important timeline features (such as keyframe, empty keyframe, gotoAndStop, play, gotoAndPlay) are tainted with BUGS, making the tasks of combining as3 + timeline “using” (and not necessarily timeline scripting wich is another subject), tricky, buggy, and Flash-Player dependant. It looks like the dev team has never used the most basic features of Flash, and it’s very very disappointing. This gotoAndStop issue is a typical example. Play() is also funny: it displays the first image twice. Now the community struggles with these bugs, and it’s really painful. The most obvious bugs may have been fixed in CS4, but my intuition is that it’s not over.

It’s also typical that programmers “explain” to designers how they should work (“just don’t use the timeline”, “make only classes, don’t put any script in the timeline”, “stop scripting”, …), because they are not aware that as3 just fullfills their own needs and forgot half of the community.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:40:30 +0000

I have to agree with Jim, while I am still struggling with as3, I find it to be a better way of programming. Similar to the tables vs css debate, it is a matter of making things standard and more flexible rather than being simple and possible to be really really messy

By: Norel

Norel — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:37:54 +0000

I don’t agree with you, jim.
More and more creative designers take the time to learn usable knowledge in AS and it make their work richer.
AS has initially been designed for creative designers, not programmers.
Such a change will be a pain for a lot of people, and it’s just too bad.

By: jim

jim — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:44:29 +0000

Well Tim, they were probably thinking that Creative Designers shouldn’t be writing programs of any kind. Personally I could not agree more with their decision. Just because something has a steep learning curve doesn’t mean it’s horrible, just that it’s beyond your limited grasp.

By: Xitri

Xitri — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:33:33 +0000

Also, if call gotoAndStop on ENTER_FRAME, animation in all childs are not played.