manewcActionscript Snippets

[AS 3] Timing Methods with Timer and setInterval

2 comments so far

I have been wondering how the setInterval method was integrated in to Actionscript 3 so I wrote up a little application to demonstrate a persistent timer. The movie was just made to trigger a function every 2 seconds

Here is my document class for this movie:

package
{
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.utils.setInterval;
	import flash.text.TextField;
	import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;
	import flash.text.TextFieldType;
	import flash.text.TextFormat;

	public class SetInterval extends Sprite {  

		public var timedProcess:uint;
		private var output:TextField;
		private var ct:uint;
		private var ms:Number = 2000;

		public function SetInterval()
		{
			buildFields();

			var timedProcess:uint = setInterval(callFunction, ms);
    	}

		private function callFunction():void
		{
			ct++;

        	output.text = "timer - " + ct + " (called every " + ms/1000 + " seconds)";
		}

		private function buildFields():void
		{
			// Text Formatting
			var myTextFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
			myTextFormat.font = "Arial";
			myTextFormat.color = 0xffffff;
            myTextFormat.size = 12;
			myTextFormat.align ="center";
            myTextFormat.underline = false;

			// output TextField
        	output = new TextField();
			output.defaultTextFormat = myTextFormat;
        	addChild(output);
            output.width = 400;
            output.height = 250;
			output.x = stage.stageWidth / 2 - output.width / 2;
        	output.y = 35;
		}
	}
}

If you are looking for a timing method that is performed for a specific number of events then the Timer() method will work great. This will just trigger an event 2 times every second. Here is the document class code for this:

package {
	//  pulled from: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/utils/Timer.html

    import flash.utils.Timer;
    import flash.events.TimerEvent;
    import flash.display.Sprite;

    public class TimerExample extends Sprite {

        public function TimerExample() {
            var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000, 2);
            myTimer.addEventListener("timer", timerHandler);
            myTimer.start();
        }

        public function timerHandler(event:TimerEvent):void {
            trace("timerHandler: " + event);
        }
    }
}

Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Actionscript 3, Timer Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.