Animate a character with Flash environment + AS3

Question

Hi !
This is a trouble I've been facing for YEARS, and no way for me to solve it. Save me my heros.
I'm trying to animate a character with Flash whose face can be changed.
So I have a Character MovieClip in which I have 4 frames. In each frame there is an animation of the little guy : one going down, one going left, right, and up.
In each animation there is the MovieClip Head in which you can attach a hat, sunglasses, hair etc... Am I clear enough ?
Here is the problem : since the head is going to be changed by the player, the MovieClip Head MUST have the same reference in each frame in each animation. Unfortunatly, Flash thinks the MovieClip Head is a new one on each animation of the little guy running. So for instance, if I attach sunglasses on the clip Head, then they will disappear as soon as the character will change his direction since Flash doesn't know the Head I'm using in the new animation isn't a new one.
What am I doing wrong ?
If I'm not clear enough, please tell me. I REALLY want to understand how to make such a thing on Flash.

Answer 1

Hi, Kromah
I've edited your files and updated here.
From looking at your files, I decided that the easiest solution without totally restructuring what you had would be the third solution, watching the stage for heads to be added, then updating any head you happen to get. 
To make this work, I ran the Set Instance Name on Multiple Frames extension to set all of the Head layers to "head." The reasoning behind this was that you didn't have a Class name assigned to your Head instance, so I fell back on checking to see if the instance name was "head." So the instance name needed to be assigned to be head.
A few other things I noticed:
Your Character symbol and your Character .as Class had the same name. This can confuse the compiler, but more importantly, this would prevent you from having any other Character symbols that used the same .as file. This is why I renamed the symbol and its Linkage name to CharacterMC.
Your button instance names start with Upper Case letters. In ActionScript, the convention is for Class members to be named starting with a lower case letter. Even though you don't see the Class in an .as file since you're not using a main Document Class, it still exists (created silently in the background by the compiler) and you still should follow the convention if for no other reason than that you will probably want to move to a main Document Class at some point.
When you use the underscore character to start a variable name, this denotes that it's internal storage for a variable that's accessible through a getter/setter pair. This is not how you've used it, but this is understandable. The standards for this have evolved over the years as AS3 has matured, and I only noticed this in the last version of the Adobe standards that was available. That seems to be a dead link now. That said, I followed what you are already doing, because it just creates confusion to do half your variables one way and half another.
I personally prefer protected to private, because you really need to know what you're doing and understand how your code is likely to evolve to be able to set things to private yet provide enough hooks for you or other developers to be able to extend your code. IME the vast majority of developers simply don't have this level of clairvoyance. However, I followed what you were already doing.
I think you should either instantiate everything and add it to the stage yourself or let the Flash player do it, not mix and match. There's more information available on the former technique than the latter, so you should probably go that way.
Update: The Apache Flex standards (which is what the old Adobe standards became) can be found here.
Message was edited by: Amy Blankenship