Thierry’s Technical Tutorials

This tutorial will explain how to enable keyboard commands in Flash Actionscript 3 CS3.

Firstly we need to import the Keyboard class in flash this can be done by:

import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;

After we have imported the keyboardEvent package, it is necessary to add an event listener to the stage, otherwise Flash will not know that we are pressing a key, and will not know what to do with it.

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, KeyPressed);

We need to create a function for our KeyPressed event listener but inside our function we create a switch statement to determine what the function should do when a certain key is pressed. Inside our parameters we have the argument evt.KeyCode this gets the key code for the key that was pressed to trigger the event.

function KeyPressed(evt:KeyboardEvent):void {switch (evt.keyCode){
case Keyboard.UP :break;case Keyboard.DOWN :break;case
Keyboard.LEFT :break;case Keyboard.RIGHT :break;
}
}

After you have specified what keys you would like to use, you can link them for example to move something. For example, if you want a square to move in the x direction when the “up” arrow is pressed on the keyboard you would add square.y += 5;

so the code above would be modified to look like this:

case Keyboard.UP :square.y += 5;break;