Movieclip.x movement using keyboard event

Question

Hi, im working on a game project and i have a question about movie clip movement using keyboard event.
Basicly i have a character on screen and it can move on the x axis using the left and right buttons.
Im making my charater move by changing the x value of the character movieclip but i find very it laggy and not smooth and if im going point by point
then it's too slow.
Whats the best way to make the character move so that the transition will be smooth.

Answer 1

Ok obviously you've left out where you add your eventListener, i'll assume that's a KEY_DOWN event. When the user holds down a key, that key event is triggered once immediately and then after a pause it is triggered at regular intervals. Check this out by holding down the up/down arrow and watching this browser window scroll.
That's not the movement you'd be looking for when moving a character in a game. Instead, you'd be setting a variable on KEY_DOWN to indicate the character direction - it could be an integer for example that you increase by 1 if the user pressed RIGHT or decrease by 1 if the user pressed LEFT.
In addition to your KEY_DOWN eventListener, you could have an ENTER_FRAME and  KEY_UP eventListeners set up:
The enterFrame event handler could move the character in the direction specified in your direction variable. This is where you might ensure your character doesn't go beyond its limits in both directions.
In the keyUp event handler, you could do the converse of what you did in the keyDown handler(increase by 1 if the user released LEFT, decrease by 1 if the user released RIGHT).