AS3 - What are the different methods of rendering animation on the screen?

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I'm a beginner to AS3 and programming in general, but have learned enough that I want to now start learning how to render animations on the screen. These are the methods that I know of from two days of "researching" on google.
I'm not in a situation where I could afford to take courses from an educational institution, so my only means of learning are through online sources.

  1. Update an objects x or y positions in a loop on every frame. Very basic. Of course any kind of advanced animation (say, showing a character running) is not possible with this method alone.
  2. Using Flash and creating animation on a movie clip's timeline and, combined with moving the position of the object we can achieve some proper animation this way. However I cannot afford Flash, so this is not an option available to me. It also doesn't seem to be a popular option among more experienced programmers either (I think, due to having poor performance when lots of objects animating on the screen?)
  3. Using a sprite sheet and then blitting the relevant image from the sprite sheet onto the screen.

Is there any other way to put an image from a sprite sheet onto the screen other than blitting?

And what other methods of rendering animation are available?

Some online websites claim that blitting is all I'll ever need, but I want to know all the options available so I could choose the most appropriate one for any given situation.
Any help would be appreciated :)

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actionscript-3animation
The second option is the right way to do it, and I've been working with AS3 since it had existed. Animating is not the job of the programmer, this is the job of a designer. Flash exports .swc that you can use in your code. But I totally get the money issue. – Warren Seine

3 Answers

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Another option for blitting is Stage3D. Take a look at Starling for 2D animations.

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Blitting would be my best opinion. The only other thing I can think of is manually taking the images from the sprite sheet and putting it into each frame of an animation.

To render animation, you can create a frame in a MovieClip and convert it into a MovieClip and name the frame 'running'. Then you need to create an Enter Frame event where the MovieClip's instance name is 'Guy' and in the code on the function write 'Guy.x += 5;' to make your MovieClip go 5 pixels to the right every frame and also in the function write "Guy.gotoAndStop('running');"

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Use TweenMax engine for better animation purposes. Easy coding, more Animation!!