emma welles

i made my preloader count down from 10 like a shuttle liftoff. i think its pretty nifty, so i thought i’d share…

this.onEnterFrame = function() {
	var amount:Number = this.getBytesLoaded()
                            / this.getBytesTotal() *100;
	loader._xscale = amount;
	loadText.text = 10 - Math.floor(Math.round(amount)/10);
	if(amount == 100) {
		this.gotoAndPlay(3);
		delete this.onEnterFrame;
	}
}

make sure  “export in first frame” is UNCHECKED for all symbols with a linkage id.

this issue drove me batty for an hour, because it was the same frickin preloader that i’ve used several times before (from www.gotoandlearn.com). i should’ve just hunted on the internet more vigorously in the first place, because once i searched google for “preloader not appearing” i found the culprit in the actionscript.org forums

The Man is trying to bring me down. yeah. anywho, some links i found interesting… may later be useful, if i ever finish this damn portfolio and get some time to play around a bit…

sandy – flash 3d

ape – actionscript physics engine

animation package

movieclip tweening prototypes

actionscript vector 3d class

many (or all, i cant remember) of these links coming from here: open source flash

thanks again to felix, i made some progress on this. i was attaching different movies for each section to an empty movie clip, but he suggested that i instead put each section in the same movie clip and label the frames appropriately.

function loadSection(id):Void{
	container.gotoAndPlay(currId + "_out");
	currId = id;
}
function outAnimDone():Void{
	container.gotoAndPlay(currId + "_in");
}

// .....

logo.b1.onPress = function(){
	loadSection(1);
}

make sure that on the last frame of your “out” animation you have the following code IN THIS ORDER (if you put stop(); after the function call, the gotoAndPlay will gotoAndStop   ).

stop();
_root.outAnimDone();

kirupa.com – transitions between external swfs

is a great article, but i want to transition between internal movie clips. i’m using attachMovie() but I can’t quite wrap my head around the logic of a button action calling a function which plays an outro and then calls another function which goes to the next section.  maybe i just need to sleep on it.

i have been having a lot of issues with my tween object animations. things jumping around weirdly in cases where animations overlapped. today, the amazing Felix came to my rescue yet again and took a quick look at my code. he suggested a more efficient solution to what i had, which was creating a new tween object for movement on rollover and then another new one on rollout. that, mixed with an attempt at using ColorFX to tween the color was getting super buggy.

// create tween object, tell it to go no where
var bTweenX:Tween = new Tween(button, "_x",
    Back.easeOut, xStart, xStart, 1);

//create color object
var bColor:ColorFX = new ColorFX(button.buttonText);

//button actions
button.onRollOver = function(){
	bTweenX.continueTo(xEnd,tweenLength);
	bColor.tint(232,184,105,100);
}

button.onRollOut = function(){
	bTweenX.continueTo(xStart,tweenLength);
	bColor.tint(188,93,20,100);
}

i had a great chat with one of our esteemed developers, the awesome crystal, at brightcove today. she suggested i buy the Essential Actionscript 2.0 so i did:

links she suggested:
macromedia xml news aggregator
fullasagoog

also she offered to take me to a meeting of BFPUG later this month. why did i not know about this before??