Firstly, create your gun and bullet graphics by drawing them both and making them MCs. When drawing the gun, make sure it is facing upwards and that the center of the MC is where the bottom of the gun is (for the point of rotation). Making the bullet is difficult because we have to position it so that when the player shoots, the bullet will be at the end of the gun. To do this, we firstly draw a circle as the bullet. Then, place a copy of the bullet MC inside the gun MC and align it to the middle of the stage. Then, double click on the bullet to edit it and the gun should go a lighter colour to show you're editing the bullet. Now, move the bullet to where the top of the gun is, as shown in the picture to the right. Go back to the gun MC and delete the copy of the bullet MC that you just put there.

Go to the main timeline, open the library and select the bullet MC. Right click or control click on it and select 'Linkage'. Check the tick box that says 'Export for Actionscript', and type 'bullet' into the identifier text box. We do this so that we can load this MC by using code and not have to have it on the main timeline.

Place a copy of the gun MC on the main timeline at the edge of the screen (wherever you want). I put mine in the bottom middle. Then give it an instance name of 'gun'.

All you should have is one frame on the main timeline with the gun MC on it. Select this frame and open the actions panel. In there, paste this code:

i = 0; onEnterFrame = function () { i++; angle = Math.atan2(-1*(_root._ymouse-_root.gun._y), _root._xmouse-_root.gun._x)/Math.PI*180; _root.gun._rotation = -1*(angle-90); }; onMouseDown = function () { var bullet:MovieClip = attachMovie("bullet", "b"+i, i); bullet._x = _root.gun._x; bullet._y = _root.gun._y; bullet._rotation = _root.gun._rotation; bullet.onEnterFrame = function() { x = Math.sin(Math.PI/180*this._rotation)*5; y = Math.cos(Math.PI/180*this._rotation)*-5; this._x += x; this._y += y; if (this._x<0 || this._x>Stage.width || this._y<0 || this._y>Stage.height) { this.removeMovieClip(); } }; };

Then we set the variable angle, which will determine the angle or rotation of the gun. The 'Math.atan2' function calculates the angle of a point given when measured counter-clockwise from a circles x axis, when the circles mid point is at 0, 0 on the stage. In simple terms, it calculates an angle where we want the gun to point. For the y value of that point, we put '_root._ymouse-_root.gun._y' to find the midpoint of the gun and the mouse and similar for the x value. So the gun is not told to point to the mouse, rather it is told to point to a point halfway between each.

We then divide all of this by 180 and multiply it by π (PI) to convert it from radians to degrees. Then the rotation of the gun is set in terms of the variable 'angle'.

We set what happens when the mouse is pressed by using the 'onMouseDown' function. Firstly, we create a MC variable named 'bullet' and attach a movie to it with the linkage name of 'bullet' (which we set earlier), a new name of 'b' and then whatever the variable 'i' is. For example, if we pressed the mouse on the 183rd frame, the bullet created would be called 'b183' and it would have a depth of 183.

The next 3 lines set the x position, y position and the rotation of the bullet to match the gun. With each bullet, we create an 'onEnterFrame' function so we can control its movement from the same frame as everything else. To control its movement, we firstly set the 'x' and 'y' variables to the sine and cosine values of the rotation in radians of the bullet, and multiply it by 5 as our speed (make it larger if you want it to go faster). Basically, these variables tell the bullet to move the way that it is facing. The next 2 lines make it so that the x and y positions of the bullet will add on whatever the respective 'x' and 'y' variables were.

The last 'if' loop checks to see if the bullet is off the stage or cannot be seen. If it is, we remove it so that the code doesn't have to run the 'onEnterFrame' function for the bullet anymore. We do this to avoid it lagging.

When you've finished, test your movie and see if it works. You can also make it so that the gun points to something else, like a MC or a given point. You can also change the speed of the bullet, or customize other variables to suit what you want.