[help] Flash Oriented Website Question

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate section for a flash question, but since it's for the design of a website I put it here. Please move it if it's incorrect.

So I'm in about day three of teaching myself flash; and I've sort of run into a stalemate regarding the actions. Inside the whole interface there's the background layer, the layer with the movie object buttons, and the layer with the "content" frames.

My little predicament is that I've got my movie objects to animate when I roll over them, and to return to their original state when you roll off of them. However when I try to set it to "go to" the appropriate content frame when you click the mouse, it goes to that frame WITHIN THE MOVIE OBJECT and not the frame for the project as a whole. I'm just wondering if there's a way to bypass this since the go to frame property worked when I use "button" objects.

Hopefully this wasn't too confusing and any flash guru should understand my plee since the concept behind really isn't that outstanding; but with only three days of personal experience from picking out of tutorials it has "halted my production" lol.

Thanks in advance if you can help!

#294235

Well, my flash is very rusty; it has been more than a year and a half since i've ever done anything on it - Here it goes nonetheless...

If you are within a movie object, you need to set the go to frame to go one level up (to the layer where the frame you want is). What i used to do is, instead of sending actions to a frame, i would give the frame an ID and send the action to the ID; i found this to be much more straight forward when doing a big project.

And now, for the mandatory Public Service Announcement :

Remember, Flash can make nifty blinky-jumpy-wachucallem, but is usually the worst thing you can use as an entire site. If you ~must~ use flash, use it conservatively.

#294237

I suppse this is kinda your actions would look like...

on (rollover) {

	 gotoAndPlay("whateverFrame");

}

Now, when this is assigned to Movie Clip.. it runs within the movie clip unless you specify where to run it.

That is specific movie clip. I assume that you want it to run in the same place when your Movie Clip is lying...

so it would be like this

on (rollover) {

	 _parent.gotoAndPlay("whateverFrame");

}

Basically, it tell the action to be run in "Parent" place where the perticular movieclip (to which you assigned the action to)".

Hope this helps..

#294259

That or, if the movie clip is pretty deep into the hierarchy just navigate out of it as you would do with relative links...

somemovieclip.anothermoviec.anotherone.gotoAndPlay("yomammaframe")

#294260

Exactly !!

Absolute targets are always better while working with deep hierarchies...

something like this...

_root.movieName.SomeOtherMovie.MyMovie.gotoAndPlay("whateverFrame")

#294261

I should've figured that variables would come back to haunt me after my dreadful programming class that I vaguely remember anything from.

So what exactly do I have do, action wise, to set an ID to each content frames and have the mouse click actions on each movie object go to those frames as apposed to the frames within the movie objects themselves?

#294332

Either way is fine - I just feel that using ID's is more organized.

#294342

The parent thingy worked! Thank you.

BUT

It only works when you click somewhere on the movie to I guess "give it focus?"

Then when you click the button it jumps to the appropriate parent frame.

But when you load the movie and click the button right away it doesn't work unless you click somewhere on the movie and then the movie button.

Edit: Yeah, if I go right to the button, clicking it doesn't play the parent frame; but if I hover over it off of it and back on and click, it works.

How would I go about fixing this?

Edit 2: Nevermind, I figured it out. I just reorded the actions so the parent frame thing had the first priority before the rollovers. I realized tha before it had to run the movie objects at least once before it allowed the parent frames to be switched.

Thanks again for all the help, this is gradually getting easier.

#294382