emma welles

a lot of very cool-looking sites are using video as a background to their page (arne-carlos.com for example), and luckily it turns out it’s not that hard to implement.

first you want to set up your flash movie to be full screen using Stage.scaleMode = “noScale” (check out my earlier post on this topic here). then, you want to set up your FLV code to have it “stream”, which I don’t understand too well but I just copy and paste the following code. note that if you add the smoothing = true, the video will look a bit better when it’s scaled up.

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection ();
nc.connect (null);
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream (nc);
holder.vid.attachVideo (ns);
holder.vid.smoothing = true;
ns.play ("videoName.flv");

now you gotta make sure that your video is scaling with the browser window, but not distorting (unless, of course, you want to be a rebel). to do this you just gotta call a function whenever the browser is resized, and set the width and height proportionately, like this one:

function onResize (){
   var scaleY:Number = Math.round (100 * (Stage.height)
       / holder.vid._height);
   var scaleX:Number = Math.round (100 * (Stage.width)
       / holder.vid._width);
   var scaleFactor:Number = Math.max (scaleY, scaleX);
   holder._xscale = holder._yscale = scaleFactor;

}

that pretty much takes care of it. if you want some more detail and an example with code you can download, check out the awesome lessrain blog.

i want to load text from an XML file, have the text fade in with the rest of the page (currently achieved through a timeline animation), and have customized scrollbars. is this possible? i seem to be running into a variety of issues.

UPDATE:  I figured it out!  Turns out you have to have it nested in *2* movie clips (creating the tween fade in the grandparent mc) AND make sure you are embedding the font as well.

apparently if you have more than one getURL() command attached to an object, IE executes only one of them. and it’s apparently random too. super.

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??

i’m giddy!! after watching the finding and using custom classes tutorial at gotoandlearn, i went and downloaded this swf decompiler. I WISH I HAD THIS BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL!! i wanted to learn flash so badly 7 years ago, and i just didn’t have the right resources or tools. man, if i had the ability to decompile swfs back then, i may have become as good at flash as i am at html.