Just great 
Just when I thought I mastered the MouseEvents in as3 (after trying almost every combination of MouseEvents, buttonMode and mouseChildren) I found a new problem situation; only this time I can seem to find a solution.
The situation looks like this:
- The two shapes are siblings so they have the same parent (i.o.w. the two shapes can’t be nested).
- The blue oval is on top of the green rectangle.
- I want to know when the mouse leaves the green rectangle.
The problem is that the green rectangle dispatches a ROLL_OUT and MOUSE_OUT event as soon as the mouse hits the blue oval.
I tried all combinations of mouseChildren, buttonMode and enabled on the oval and on the parent of the two clips, but nothing seems to make the oval not “steal focus” of the rectangle.
Here is the source of the test: Rollout test (zip)
I can think of some workarounds (hitArea, using an invisible button, etc.) but I much rather find a straight way to handle this kind of situation.
Since this was never a problem in as2 I believe there should be a decent solution in as3 as well.
If someone has an answer to this problem or knows about a secret property I haven’t tried, please let me know…
justGREAT! I start off designing some tiles just for practice and one day later I end up with a neat experiment 
I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:
Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm
The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.
Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).
At the moment I’m trying to learn how to make timeline animations in Flash and yet somehow I end up animation which is 80% coded, isn’t that just great!?
Just fooling around I came up with this result:
Jolly jellyfish - vector animation | download
The movement and generation of the jellyfish is all actionscript (2.0), the “squezing” is timeline-animation…
