[york28]

I have a simple ten frame animation of an eye blinking that I want to have loop after random interals of time. Any ideas how this could be done? I'm fairly new to flash and haven't learned much action script yet.

[skalie]

Probably many ways to do this, here's what I'd do......

Create a loop where nothing happens, on the first frame generate a random variable.....

RandomVariable = Math.floor(Math.random( ) * 10);

......will give you a number between 1 and 10

Then do something like......

if (RandomVariable == 3){
gotoAndPlay("wink");
}

.............."wink" being the number or label of the frame that's starts the wink loop, return to the first frame of the nothing happens loop.

Edit: forgot the "floor" command, that turns the random number into an integer.

[york28]

Thanks a lot.

I was reading up on ways to do this and several sources said not to use if or while loops because they can gobble cpu cycles and render the computer viewing the movie very slow.

Any facts behind this?

[skalie]

if and while loops will use the processor I guess ( I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to how things tick), but in any of your reading did they mention an alternative?

Maybe you could post the urls of what you read, I'd be interested.

[york28]

Nevermind, I got a little mixed up. I guess what is a bad idea is to just have a logic loop that checks the value of a variable constantly, such as by using an infinite loop that is only exited by a conditional statement.

The solution above, however, only test the variable once in a while, most of the time is spent playing an empty loop, so I'm guessing that this is fine.

Thanks for the help, skalie. If you want to see what I've done so far you can check it out here:
eo