Grouping all the objects?

Question

Guys i am quite new to flash programming and i did managed to get around it with out any trouble so far but i came to a position where i needed to animate all the elements in the scene at once with out having to animate one by one using AS3 .
for example :-
in a match 3 game if there are 3 matches i want to do animation of matched elements and after i have done that i want to move all the top objects to fall at once no matter how many rows and coloumns there are  above , so how could i do that by using any Tweens ?
the way i am doing now is to check whether there is any empty space below it and move that element one step down but i want all the above elemts to fall at once .
please help me if you could guys thank you.

Answer 1

In a screen with a huge amount of gems this is going to kill you, even if you use something like greensock.com's TweenLite (which you should be using).
The logic loop you should do is multi-iterative, meaning you need to pre-calculate on a gem-by-gem basis, both determining if a gem needs to fall and how far. You should be saving the a reference to the gem and the distance inside an array. I doubt you'll need a Vectors performance.
To make it simple, you want a SINGLE way of moving all the gems at once. 2 approaches are an onEnterFrame loop or a Timer, it's really up to you.
onEnterFrame or Timer both would fire off a function at the desired interval. Every time the function is fired you would iterate through your array of gems that need to fall. You change all of their positions by your desired amount (speed). Once any gem hits its target you remove it from the array. As each hits its target destination and are removed the array will empty itself completely. Once you detect all objects are removed from the array you know they have all been moved down to their final locations.
This method ensures you only have a single, low cost loop operating while able to move all your gems at once. It's excessively more efficient than tweening each individual gem and mobile friendly.
You should save direct references to the gems that are falling inside this array as well. Think of each array entry like this:
fallingGemsArray[gemIndex] = [referenceToGem, distanceToFall]
getChildByName() is very expensive. Saving a reference to the gem directly in the array will speed that up drastically, especially with a lot of objects.