Allright so I am making a little program that allows a user to click a block which then moves into an open space (for simplicity's sake let's assume there is one).
How could I check which MovieClip is to the immediate right/left/bottom/top of the movie clip?
Related
I'm aware that addChild (1) adds the object into a display container object, and (2) shows the object in the DisplayObjectContainer. What I want to know is what happens when an object is added into a DisplayObjectContainer?
To summarize my question is (are),
Is there any magic happens when addChild invoked? i.e. Something is happening in, for example, DisplayObjectContainer.
Let's say, I have MovieClip A and B. B has A as part of it. I called addChild (A) in B. In MainTimeline and Stage, I don't call addChild (B). Visually, since B hasn't been added, A won't be there too. However, does A is exist (e.g. the memory allocated), even though it's not on the Stage?
I have searched here and there in SO, but humongous amount of the questions asked related to mine are technical. I greatly appreciate any answer or pointer regarding my questions
Here is simplified explanation of what happens.
When you create MovieClip A (or any object) using the new keyword (or if using FlashPro an item that exists on the timeline where the playhead is), that object is in memory. So whether or not MovieClip A is on the display list, it is taking up memory in your application.
When you use addChild, here are some of those things that happen (not necessarily in order):
If the object being added already has parentage, it is removed from that parent (though scale and position are kept, and will now be relative to the new parent).
Events are dispatched on the new parent (and the old parent if applicable). Event.ADDED and Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE + Event.REMOVED / REMOVED_FROM_STAGE on the old parent.
The parent(s) of the newly added object, will now take into account the new child/grandchild. Things like hit tests, and bounds, and mouse overs etc.
On the next frame tick (the stage's refresh rate), that item will be drawn
All that said, once a movieClip is on the display list, there is performance drain VS just having that object in memory - so if an object doesn't need to be seen, it's more efficient to have it off the display list until it needs to be seen.
If using FlashPro/Animate, you should also be aware that if through code you do anything that manipulates the parentage of a timeline display object (addChild/removeChild/setChildIndex etc), that timeline object will no longer be managed by the timeline. That means that if you have an empty keyframe to remove an item from the timeline, that item will actually stay on the screen until you either explicitly remove it (removeChild(item)) or it's parent goes away.
For a project I have several movie clips into one frame in those movieClips you will find a button to go to the next movieClip.
All pages (movieClips) overlap each other.
The movie clips in this case are all different pages that I want to connect through a button.
When I click on the button in the movie clip I can not use gotoAndPlay because I want everything in the same frame. I think I should use removeChild for the other movie clips to remove them and only show the one i need when I press the button?
So is there an alternative for gotoAndPlay(); or should i just use removeChild(); if you click the button?
I have little experience with AS3 so I do not know exactly how I should do it.
You can either:
set the visibility with .visible = false/true;
set their alpha with .alpha = 0 - 1; (if they are interactive, they will stay interactive so careful about that)
remove them and add them (as you already proposed)
move them off screen (bad solution)
I would probably set their visibility. Or you can do it with removeChild. There is no gotoAndPlay() for this scenario.
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 have a particular problem : I have a fla with 2 frames, with a clip of instance name "my_clip" on frame 1 and no clip en frame 2. If i move by code (like a tween) "my_clip", when I go to frame 2, the clip is still on screen, whereas frame 2 is totally empty in my fla.
How flash work at this level ? Does he stop "syncronizing" a clip with the fla once the clip has been moved by code ? How can I check at frame 2 that the scene should be empty ?
(I'm with flash cs 5.5 and player 11)
Actually what FLASH does when we are trying to change the depth or start drag and some more dynamic functionality it freezes the target movieclip in stage. Eventually there is only one stage in FLASH and guess what if the movieclip has been frozen in the stage? It is visible or available always.
So in your case the same has happened. The clip has just frozen to the stage. Needless to say, the second frame is empty always. You don't need to check the second frame. What all you need to do is remove that clip before you navigates to either next frame or scene.
#LondonDrugs_MediaServices : I can't post my code and fla because there is too much code unrelated to the problem.
But as I was trying to make a little fla to reproduce my problem and show it to you, I figure out that the problem was not where I thought it was : I fact it was because each time I start dragging my clip i was doing a setChildIndex on it to put it on top. And it was precisely the setChildIndex wich would cut the "syncronization" between the clip and the fla timeline.
Thanks anyway for your answers, it kind of help me in a way :)