Jump to frame to create a sort of loop

[Guest]

Hello and thanks for reading.

I'm currently having this problem: I'm making a flash game that includes talking interactions between the playable character and NPCs. What I want is a way to get the NPC to blink every once in a while if the player remains in the same screen.

In other words, I want to create a sort of 'loop', for example, in frames 1-5, with the character blinking during frames 4 and 5. I've already asignated buttons so that the player can get out of the 'loop', but I'm having trouble in getting from frame 5 back to frame 1. At first, I used

gotoAndPlay(1);

but it just kept crashing, until an error telling me to use onClipEvent popped up. I decided to try it, not really knowing how to in this particular case, and of course it didn't work. So basically, I'm out of ideas, since I know only the basics of AS 2.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Ned Murphy]

Create the blinking activity as a separate movieclip and tell it to play thru whenever you wish to have a blink occur.  You could use a timing mechanism such as setInterval or setTimeout to tell that movieclip to play periodically.