Actionscript 2 Play animations at random

Question

I have several animations called mc_star_anim, each one is of a star and in each instance is a simple tween which makes it brighter, I have about 20 of these on the page, all with the same name, all tweens start at the same time, so at them moment they all flash together, how can I write some AS2 that will randomly play one of these every 2 seconds or so to make it look like twinkling stars?

Any help appreciated.

Ian

Answer 1

Place stop(); at first frame inside all you animation MovieClips.

Then put all of these MovieClips inside the array.

var starArr=[];
starArr.push(mc_star_anim_1);
starArr.push(mc_star_anim_2);
//etc

After that you could use setInterval() to call function which pick one random star MovieClip from array every 2 seconds and start animation inside that star.

function playRandomStar(){
    starArr[random(starArr.length)].play();
}
var interval = setInterval(playRandomStar,2000);

If you need stop all this sometime after you could use that line

clearInterval(interval);