I have a problem accessing a List and TextInput fields placed inside an MC.
What I'm trying to do is an animation for a menu. So I placed buttons and List and a TextInput inside a MC which I want to animate.
I'm trying to access them like this:
string_variable = mc_name.textInput_Name.text;
Everything worked fine before I placed those controls inside an MC. The code was, of course, without mc_name. prefix before that.
What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this? My goal is to make a complex keyframe animation of a clip with buttons and other controls inside it, specifically List and TextInput ones.
Thanks.
Most animations, especially UI, like menu blocks, lists, could be done with tweening engines. You will have more control over animated elements. MovieClip isn't a nice choice to use as mechanism to animate UI components that should be accessed.
Anyway, If you want MovieClips in your project, give same names to the components on the timeline on every keyframe. It will help, a bit...
Related
i am working with several nested movieclip objects in a project. but i get into trouble with the buttons i created and implemented in the nested movieclips:
to describe it in a simple way:
I have a main movieclip with five frames, including two buttons with listeners to browse between the frames. Then inside of one Frame I have another movieclip with its own buttons. i instanciated it by hand not through code and gave it a specific name like "nestedMc".
Now I dont want to build the Listeners for those buttons inside the class of the nested movieclip class but in its parent class, which works fine until i then goto another frame in the main movieclips timeline and come back.
obviously every time flash enters a frame its contents get created anew (and therefore get new instance names). I could now try solve this through filling the frames via code.
But maybe there is another way to make sure the frame contains the same instance everytime i enter?
Timeline scripting is a dirty business, and really, a carry-over compatibility layer for Actionscript 2 projects. Whenever possible, I highly recommend not doing it, and simply keeping all of your code in your document class. As you're experiencing, timeline code causes headaches.
Consider instead just creating both states of your Stage (it sounds like that's what your two buttons are jumping between) and simply hiding them offstage or setting their alpha to zero and their mouseEnabled state to false. Furthermore, if the purpose of your frames is to play animation (a tween), consider instead switching to a much more powerful suite such as TweenLite. Moving an object over a hundred pixels (smoothly) can be as easy as:
TweenLite.to(redBall, 3, {x:100});
Now, if you're manually adding these items to the stage, as long as the object is a dynamic one, you can assign an instance name to it which will be saved between frame loads. Be aware the object name is not the same as the instanced name. For example:
var redBall:Ball = new Ball();
redBall.name = "bubbles";
The object's name is Ball, but it's represented as a variable called redBall. Its actual DisplayList name will likely be ambiguous (such as "Instance71"), and I can manually define it as "bubbles". 3 different names for the same object, all very different and necessary.
Even if you give the object a displayList name, you may not be able to reference it through code unless you enable Automatically declare stage instances, which basically creates on each object a pointer to the displayList object.
That said, you can always fetch the object by other means. Obviously, your buttons are always appearing, but you're trying to find a very specific object on the stage. At this point, we can use getChildByName() or getChildAt().
Hope that helps.
-Cheers
I'm making a multi-part introductory animation for a game. It works when I preview in Flash, but not when I export using the CreateJS toolkit to get HTML5 output.
On my scene's timeline, I have this.stop(); on the first frame, as well as a movie clip that contains several seconds of animation (and which may have to change in length as we develop).
My second frame is labeled "sc2" and I would like the animation to pick up there when the first movieclip is finished. To accomplish this, I went into the first movie clip and put this on the last frame:
_parent.gotoAndPlay("sc2");
This works fine in Flash, but perhaps I can't use the _parent object in JS? Is there an alternative way to access the flow of control or another way to accomplish this? My goal is to avoid doing animation on the main timeline and to control the flow by scripting there so that if the length of the individual sections of animation changes, I don't have to change the start and end frames of the various sections in several places.
I'm working on a game that uses mx canvases (each in their own mxml file) to wrap different aspects of the application. So the UI is wrapped in one canvas, the main game screen in another, and so on. I am having an issue where mouse input (specifically MouseEvent.CLICK, but it seems to apply to all mouse input) that I want to go to a movieClip in the GameScreen.mxml is being caught by an mx.core.FlexSprite object called "contentPane" that is a child of the GameUI.mxml.
This contentPane sprite doesn't exist when the GameUI object is instantiated, and in fact doesn't seem to exist until I set the text of some textFields contained by the GameUI. These textFields do overlap the movieClip that I want to receive the mouse input, but the textFields themselves are set to mouseEnabled = false, and are not catching the mouse input.
None of my code is directly creating this contentPane sprite, and some elementary Googling tells me that this contentPane sprite is created by the mx.flex.container internally. However, I can't seem to find any documentation on how this actually works, and what causes this sprite to be created.
This functionality has worked previously, and the only significant recent change I'm aware of is moving the swfs loaded into the GameUI into their own application domain to fix a namespace collision. I'm entirely prepared to believe that is the issue.
Ideally, I'd like to know why this contentPane is suddenly catching mouse input. Failing that, I'd at least like to find some documentation on how contentPane works, how I can manipulate it, and what causes its instantiation.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Edit:
I've done some additional digging and wanted to share what I've learned:
The contentPane variable is instantiated in mx.core.container objects for scrolling and clipping purposes. If the content of an mx.core.container object exceeds the size of that object, the container will create a contentPane and move its contents into that pane. However, if scrolling is disabled (verticalScrollPolicy="off" & horizontalScrollPolicy="off") and clipping is disabled (clipContent="false") then the container will not instantiate the contentPane. This solved my specific problem as I did not need either scrolling or clipping behavior in this container.
I would still like to know if there's a way to disable mouse input for an mx.core.container contentPane. It seems like there should be.
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 these 2 separate FLA (AS3) files and I want to merge them together. One FLA, let's name "Animation.fla", consists of a 1-frame animation with a class assigned to its main stage, let's label it "MainStage.cs." The other FLA file, label it, "Navigator.fla", consists of 3 frames where I have to navigate different frames to get to the animation on the Animation.fla.
I have tried nesting the two but I gain errors when trying to convert the whole Animation.fla to movieclip and put it on the frame of the Navigator.fla. It's seems it's not the correct way to do it.
Please fill me in with ideas on merging animations with Classes since I'm still new to this.
I have tried nesting the two but I
gain errors when trying to convert the
whole Animation.fla to movieclip and
put it on the frame of the
Navigator.fla. It's seems it's not the
correct way to do it.
This is one way to do it. It could be that your code has errors. Please post your code.
In the meantime, check if:
-your MovieClips have instance names
-you are referencing your MovieClips correctly in your code.
You could you create a new movieclip on the stage of Animation.fla and select all of the frames in Navigator.fla, right click and "copy frames". Then go back to Animation.fla and paste them into your new movieclip. This will work if you don't have a main class in Animation.fla.