Ok, AS3 can render thousands of particles per frame… but what if we want more than a few single moving pixels and hittests? So I started to write a small test, instancing bitmaps on random locations. And hey: These objects look like bombs, now I need something to destroy them … and there was the battleship ;). For the hittest I used getObjectsUnderPoint. It seems like this method is a bit slower than hitTest or hitTestObject, but you can actually save a lot of loops because you don’t need to test each bomb with each shot. Instead of:

// pseudo code
for each(bombs) {
    for each(shots) {
        if(bomb.hitTestObject(shot)) {
            // shot hit bomb...
        }
    }
}

you go:

// pseudo code
for each(bombs) {
    var objects:Array = shotClip.getObjectsUnderPoint(bomb.x, bomb.y);
    if(objects.length) {
          // shot hit bomb...
    }
}

This only works, if you have a seperate clip for the shots. Enough of the talk: Launch!

(Move using the mouse and rotate the gun with cursor keys)