Creating an AS3 Game Framework - The Essential Guide to Flash Games - page 86

dispatchEvent(new CustomEventScoreBoardUpdate

(CustomEventScoreBoardUpdate.UPDATE_TEXT,

Main.SCORE_BOARD_CLICKS,String(clicks)));
The GameFrameWork ( ScoreBoard listens for class updates from this

CustomEventScoreBoardUpdate :
game.addEventListener(CustomEventScoreBoardUpdate.

UPDATE_TEXT, scoreBoardUpdateListener, false, 0, true);
The GameFrameWork class acts on those events with the scoreBoardUpdateListener function and
passes the values needed to the ScoreBoard.update method. The function takes the passed in
key as a parameter and calls the setContentText function of the corresponding
SidebySideScoreElement to set the new value for the content field. A detailed description of the
SideBySideSoreElement class is next.

The SideBySideScoreElement class
SideBySideScoreElement is what we like to call a helper class. It probably could exist on its own
and be used by other game elements, but its primary goal is to simplify the ScoreBoard class
structure and code. As we were writing this framework, we found a few places where we were
creating a lot of duplicated code in a class. This was and usually is a red flag that signifies a class
is trying to do too much and needs to by modified and or split into some helper classes. The other
helper class we created was the CustomBlitButton for the BasicScreen class.
Create the SieBySideScoreElement.as file in the framework package structure we created earlier:
/source/classes/com/efg/framework/SideBySideScoreElement.as
Here is entire code listing for this class:
package com.efg.framework
{
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.text.TextFormat;

/**
* ...
* @author Jeff Fulton
*/

public class SideBySideScoreElement extends Sprite {
private var label:TextField = new TextField();
private var content:TextField = new TextField();
private var bufferWidth:Number;

public function SideBySideScoreElement(x:Number, y:Number,

bufferWidth:Number, labelText:String,labelTextFormat:

TextFormat, labelWidth:Number, contentText:String,
contentTextFormat:TextFormat) {

this.x = x;
this.y = y;

this.bufferWidth= bufferWidth;