I’ve been able to learn Actionscript 2 and 3 in a month. I’m still learning, but I know some stuff. If you’ve got the latest version of Flash definitely choose Actionscript 3. AS3 is much faster than the previous versions and it has more capabilities. There are some drawbacks however. A few of the functions that were great before have been replaced or deleted.
HitTest is a function that should not have been messed with. It has been replaced with an extremely complicated alternate. I’ve spent hours trying to learn how to use this function and still have not used it. It would be easier to use HitTestObject, but that doesn’t check for pixel collisions.
I tried seeing how many times you could use HitTestObject before it started lagging and I was really surprised. I used 33 FPS for this. 300 000 HitTestObject per second could be used without lagging on my 5-year-old computer! That really amazes me. If you’ve got a lot of collision detection to do don’t worry about it unless you’re using hundred thousands every second.