As3 Character movement in diffrent directions with labels?

Question

I hope you can help me with the following problem:

I made a character in Illustrator. The player sees the character from above. When you press the left arrow key character.gotoAndStop('left'); the character moves to the left. (Same goes for the right direction with label 'right' When you release the left or right arrow key (upKey) the character goes back to the label 'up'.

I'm trying to accomplish the following: When the character is facing down ('down'). the left key should go to the ("facingdownleft") label and on release back to the label ('down'). (Same for the right direction)

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, downKey);
function downKey(event:KeyboardEvent)
{
 if(event.keyCode==39){
 isRight=true;
 character.gotoAndStop('right');}
 if(event.keyCode==37){
 isLeft=true;
 character.gotoAndStop('left');}
 if(event.keyCode==38){
 isUp=true;
 character.gotoAndStop('up');
 }
 if(event.keyCode==40){
 isDown=true;
 facingdown=true;
 character.gotoAndPlay('down');}
}

if( facingdown == true && isLeft == true)
{ 
 character.gotoAndPlay('downleft');
}


stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, upKey);
function upKey(event:KeyboardEvent){
 if(event.keyCode==39){
 isRight=false;
 character.gotoAndPlay('up')}
 if(event.keyCode==37){
 isLeft=false
 character.gotoAndPlay('up')}
 if(event.keyCode==38){
 isUp=false;}
 if(event.keyCode==40){
 isDown=false}
 }

I made a boolean for facingdown and an if statement for downleft:

  if( facingdown == true && isLeft == true)
    { 
     character.gotoAndPlay('downleft');
    }

But before I make numerous amounts of if statements again, I would like to know if I'm on the right track and if you can help me accomplish this? Thank you so much in advance and feel free to ask questions.

Answer 1

You could try something like the following code:

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, downKey);
function downKey(event:KeyboardEvent)
{
    if( event.keyCode == Keyboard.UP )
    {
        isUp=true;
        character.gotoAndStop('up'); // up (animated?)
    }
    else if( event.keyCode == Keyboard.DOWN )
    {
        isUp=false;
        character.gotoAndStop('down'); // down (animated?)
    }

    else if( event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT )
    {
        if( isUp )
            character.gotoAndStop('left'); // (up)left
        else
            character.gotoAndStop('downleft'); // downleft      
    }
    else if( event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT )
    {
        if( isUp )
            character.gotoAndStop('right'); // (up)right
        else
            character.gotoAndStop('downright'); // downright
    }
}

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, upKey);
function upKey(event:KeyboardEvent)
{
    if( event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT || event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT )
    {
        if( isUp )
            character.gotoAndStop('up'); // up (still?)
        else
            character.gotoAndStop('down'); // down (still?)
    }
}

I tried to do something as close as possible to your original code.

But it's yet a very simple solution that doesn't handle multi-key pressed at the same time etc... And obviously you should consider different keyframes for immobile and animated "up" and "down". I supposed that your bools were globals so I reduced it to one because it doesn't seems useful in this portion of code, but indeed you can re-introduce the other bools if needed elsewhere.