Help with conditional statements

Question

i am being forced to develope a game and really only know the
basics of flash. What i need to have happen is have a movie clip
drag something but only when the clip is in its closed position.
Essentially it would be like having a movie clip of a hand that
opened and closed and when the hand was closed you could press a
button to make it drag something. Can anyone help me with the code
i need for this.
Any help would be appreiciated.

Answer 1

You didn't say whether the hand movie clip is looping its
action or not.
Assuming that the clip constantly loops between an opened and
closed hand, here is a simple script.
First, determine which frame number is the open hand (and it
should come AFTER the open position). In my examples, I'll assume
that the hand closes on frame 20 inside the movie clip.
Second, give your movie clip an instance name. In this
example, I'll call it "hand".
Finally, place this script in an empty keyframe on the root
timeline, either at frame 1, or at the same frame number where the
hand first appears:
hand.onPress = function() {
if (this._currentframe>=20) {
this.stop();
this.startDrag();
hand.onRelease = function() {
this.stopDrag();
this.play();
Hope this helps.