I have a flash object that is comprised of three layers...
the top layer 'Layer1' is a layer where a bunch of stuff happens for the program to run (drawing shapes, movie clips, etc) using as3... the next two layers just sit underneath and serve as a background image to the main program that is happening on 'Layer 1'. I want to programmatically add shapes and sprites and things to the 'masklayer' so that I can update the mask layer programmatically as well...however I can't seem to figure out how to do this...anytime i try to access the object it defaults to the top layer...anybody know?
The layers on your timeline only exist in the editor. There are no "layers" in a compiled swf.
To manipulate the ordering of a display object at runtime, you can use addChildAt(). This works even if the display object is already a child of that container.
However, it's generally better to avoid that by creating parent display objects at design time. For example, you could create movie clips called maskContainer and imgContainer and whatever you want to have on the bottom you could add using imgContainer.addChild().
Related
I have several images in my scene, I managed to make the zoom and pan work but the problem is, All of the images are zooming in at the same time. The scripts are place on each gameobject. I used gameobject for the images.
You need apply a filter so you just appli the transformations to one game object, since every one of them are GameObjects I recommend use raycast to sellect an object and then activate his Zoom.cs script just for this object.
I sugest to use just one Zoom.cs in the scene instead of every object having his own copy, then change your function to work with one game object as a paremeter and, when you touch your game object then that object will be the one to suffer the transformation.
If you doesn't want to implement a raycast or change your function at all, then you could set all the images inside a matrix, or use an index system, the central image, or the index you designed, will be the one to suffer the transformations. so you can scroll betwen your gaery and be sure that just the image that you designate in your matrix/index will be the choosen one. The trouble here is that you need to fully control the scroll animation so no one of the images will be in a wrong place like in between two index.
The application I am writing is not a game, but does require many of the features one would use in a game... displaying a 2D scene, moving the camera to pan and zoom, rotating or otherwise animating objects within the scene. But the display of the scene will be controlled via numerous regular windows controls.
The best comparison I can think of right now is a level editor. The majority of the user interface is a standard window with panes that contain different controls. The scene is contained in another child window. When the user makes adjustments such as camera location, the scene responds accordingly.
So far, everything I've seen about cocos is geared around a single window. Is it possible to embed a scene into a child window as I've described?
You can add your custom layer to your main scene using Director::getInstance()->getRunningScene()->addChild(...) function
I am making a game in AS3 for a school project (using the AIR api). I have about a year's worth of experience in AS3, so i would say i'm proficient but not an expert. Anyway, i have never attempted to do sprite animations in AS3 and i'm not quite sure how to approach it.
If i create a list of bitmaps and call addChild() and removeChild() to display each frame of the animation, it would affect the framerate as these functions are not very efficient (i have tried this before and it tanked my framerate if i had too many animations going at once). I have also tried creating a list of BitmapData objects, adding a bitmap to the display list, and then pointing it to a different BitmapData each frame, but this does not seem to work at all.
So what is the best way to do this? In XNA, for example, i would create a sprite class that draws to the screen using a sprite batch, then i would create a list of sprite objects and cycle through them to create the animation. Is there any way to achieve a similar result in actionscript?
First (simple) method: you can just use multi-frame MovieClip for animation. Put an image in each frame, put a MovieClip on the stage and that's all. You can control this animation using play(), stop(), gotoAndPlay(), gotoAndStop(). It will work without much problems for a generic platform game (I did that myself long ago).
Second (advanced) method: use bitmap blitting. For each animation, create a bitmap image that holds each frame of the animation. Use this image as a source for copying pixels into your current animated object. You just need to copy a particular rectangle area inside a source bitmap that corresponds to the current frame.
The actual blitting happens here
destinationBitmapData.copyPixels(sourceBitmapData, areaRectangle, destinationPoint);
Where destinationBitmapData is your "canvas" that you're blitting to; sourceBitmapData is the source image holding all animation frames; areaRectangle is the Rectangle inside the source image defining which area to copy; destinationPoint is left-top coordinate of the copy area in your canvas.
The destination canvas can be just one small object (like your game character that is moving around) or the entire game screen with all objects. I.e. instead of blitting and adding each object separately, you can just have one big canvas and blit any necessary parts directly to it.
That said, there is already a number of various ready-made engines that use blitting and even advanced techniques like 3D acceleration for 2D sprites.
One of them is Starling.
How do i get my UILoader to play a .swf file once then disappear until called upon again?
I am creating a guitar tutorial app that shows you chords and the transitions between them. to display the chords I'm using standard Flash graphics and for the transitions i am using a UI Loader to display the .swf files for instance, on the C chord frame, the fingers are in position and the UI Loader is a layer on top of it, when the chord transition is selected from the list component it loads the chordtransition.swf.
The problem is that once the swf is loaded it plays on loop, ive added "stop();" in many different places as people suggest and it doesn't make a difference.
I would like to be able to click "C-D" on the component list then for the .swf to play once then disappear.
Any ideas??
A strategically placed stop() should work (last frame on the timeline in the swf). You'll need to stop the right movieclip - if your movie has nested clips you might be stopping the wrong clip.
However, creating multiple swf's just to show different chords looks like overkill to me.
Create clips showing all chords on the main timeline, and add frame labels to indicate where they start and put stop() at the end of every chord animation (are you using animations?).
Use movieclipWithChords.gotoAndPlay("chord_C");
If you are not using animations you can use movieclipWithChords.gotoAndStop("chord_C");
Of course you can also create labels like 'C' and 'D', and use those as a direct mapping of the chords.
Update: After reading your question again I realize you are actually showing clips of a transition from one chord to another. In that case you can still use my suggestion as above, only your labels will not be for the individual chords, but for the chord transitions e.g. 'transition_C-D' or 'transition_G-B'.
I have searched a lot lately, I found that I can load an external swf file to my haxe project at compile time, and use the movieClips via their IDs as Classes types ..
That's cool& nice, but how it would work when I instantiate a MovieClip that has layers?
What I have is MovieClips with layers, layer of image, and a layer of text over the image layer.
So, is this achievable? will I be seeing instances of movieClips (images& texts over them) ?
Let's first dissect the flash terms in terms of code,
Layers :
Consider the layers as grouped z indexes. A single layer with multiple objects will also assign sub z indexes to each clip (see the send to back option in context menu)
The flash IDE provides you a nice interface to group & lock a few instances of objects, while working on the other. Each such group is a layer.
At runtime, every layer (with it's objects) will be concatenated into one single list (the display list) and the objects placed onto the stage in order of their position in the list.
Frames :
Frames are slices of time controlled by the fps property of the flash player. So if you have 12 fps, it means that whatever code you put in that frame of time will receive attention for 1/12th of a second.
Of course there is code being written for anything you do inside a frame or layer. The code, for example that you put in manually in IDE is added in by calling the addframescript internally.
MovieClip
The MovieClip class itself is actually an IDE related thing. The split being Sprite Class plus a timeline (collection of frames) plus associated properties & methods.
The Movieclip class thus provides you with properties like currentFrame, totalFrames, etc & methods like gotoAndPlay(), stop(), etc to interact with the flash controlled class.
Considering all of the above together, you should expect to see different images/text/objects at different intervals of time as defined in the frames when you access the movieclip.
I haven't spent a lot of time in flash, but the answer to your question comes from having a better understanding of how Flash/AS3 works, and not so much to do with Haxe.
Quoting this answer:
Layers only exist in the Flash IDE. They are not part of Flash Player's display list system. So you can't specify what layer a child goes into. Use addChild() or addChildAt() to add children to containers.
So that means Haxe will not have any concept which object is in which layer, nor would AS3 for that matter. The correct approach seems to be to use containers with IDs, which are recognised by AS3 or Haxe, and then add children to the containers.
TLDR: use containers movie clips, not layers.