How long on average to go from AS2->AS3?

> Anyone know why abeall had such terrible timeline experiences?

Because AS3 wasn't really written with the timeline in mind, I think, it was made with Flex (no timeline) in mind.

You can still use the stage to visually design things, just avoid frames for anything but animation.

Put your different application states and such in completely different MovieClips and instantiate and remove them at runtime. This, of course, is very clunky, because it means it's a lot hard to share assets between closely related design elements, and the process is very disjointed from a visual perspective.

So AS3 is basicly code-first, timeline-second? It seems that the timeline experience you had is just entirely flash9 bugginess that'll be worked out. Though how long has F9 been out?

Anyone know why abeall had such terrible timeline experiences?

FYI I also use the timeline sometimes to construct interfaces. I like designers to feel free to hop into my projects and adjust things visually. Otherwise they leave it up to me to change code. So using the timeline is the way to go for me, so I don't have to do everything, and you're tellin me F9 is bolluxed?

Perhaps just getting used to having to use double frames for everything is the answer (i.e. all objects/code fired off on one frame and the timeline plays 1 frame, and then you start 'doing things').. Sucks but 1 frame sounds like it should do it.

although maybe abeall's real-life experiments suggest otherwise...

By "wait" I should really say you "can't." I gave up trying to get it to work.

Full story:

1) A classic way to design Flash apps is to put your different application states on different frames -- either on the main timeline, or inside MovieClips. Usually a combination of the two, representing major application states and sub-module states. Then you just gotoAndStop at the appropriate time and wire up anything on the stage at the frame that needs to be (populate text fields, etc).

2) I tried to do this with an AS3 project, a very simple (two state) AS3 project.

3) In AS3, the gotoAndStop does not work instantaneously, as mentioned previously.

4) AS3 offeres a RENDER event, which is supposed to fire after all instances have been rendered. In the case of timeline instances, it fires prematurely, so is useless.

5) I tried setting up an enterFrame event to monitor when instances became available. AMAZINGLY, some instances become available in one frame, where as other instances may not be available until the next frame. Note that if you even try to access a null instance reference before it is registered in AS, it throws a runtime error and your movie breaks.

6) Even if you get past all that, some timeline instances are not properly removed if you step backwards to a previous frame. This, to me, was the fatal blow, and I redesigned my application.

The only sane solution is to avoid the timeline in AS3 as much as possible.

What do you mean by 'wait'? Do you have to do some kind of onEnterFrame that waits for something after you stop() on that frame?

> Overall I'm still not against proceedural for a lot of simple tasks. Is it impossible to use proceedural in AS3? Does it
> require everything to be OOP?

Nope, you can still use procedural design if you want. It's still object oriented. You can still code right on the timeline, and you can even use prototype for the most part, too.

However, AS3 is not good for simple tasks. It offers very little new abilities that matter for simple projects, and it has a lot of complexities that get in the way.

For instance, one major thing that has changed is that gotoAndStop no longer is instantaneous, like AS1/2. When you call gotoAndStop, none of the instances at that frame are available to the script. You have to wait.

I'm used to OOP in general and I've done plenty with AS2 classes. That isn't to say I used them wholly correctly, and find object scope a bit frustrating in AS2 which is why I'm happy to see event callbacks retain their original object scope.

Overall I'm still not against proceedural for a lot of simple tasks. Is it impossible to use proceedural in AS3? Does it require everything to be OOP?

I think if you are already frequently programming classes in as2 then you will be able to move to as3 OOP with ease. If you are not making/using classes regularly in as2 then you may want to get used to that in as2 first (where perhaps you are more comfortable with everything else) then the transition will be easier. Just my opinion.

Or you can go timeline in as3 (found a link to this on David Stiller's blog): http://www.insideria.com/2008/01/actionscript-30-is-it-hard-or.html

Depends on how hungry you are to learn it. A book that really accelerated my leap to AS3 was "Essential Actionscript 3.0" by Colin Moock. You have to read it for it to work though.

Prepare to be really frustrated in the beginning of the process. However if you peak over the learning curve, you will find that AS3 is far better than AS2 in terms of power, flexibility and development time.