Re: FLASH: clock metaphor

[John Croteau]

Hi Chris,


> My current project is based on a clock metaphor. There is only one hand

> which begins on the "12" postion. When the user clicks on the "1", the hand

> animates to the "1" and stops. My 1st question is how to program a move

> from "12" to (for instance) "7". Do I

> a) have a different set of frames for each possible moves 'from/to', and

> write in a button action to jump to the first frame of the corresponding

> set and play?

Not a good idea.


> b) have one big animation that circles the clock face and stops via some other

> logic? What could I use to stop the animation at a point determined by

> which number the user clicks to start the animation?

Yes use a nested mvie clip to allow or disallow continued motion.


> c) have a different scene for each possible move 'from/to', and write in a

> button action to play the corresponding scene?

Very VERY bad idea


> My second question is can Flash be instructed to play an animation in

> reverse? This would come in handy when the hand is on "12" and the user

> clicks "11" (so the hand doesn't have to go all the way around).

Generally the best way (smallest file size0 to do reverse is a copy of

the frames in reverse.


The basic continuous nested animation.


Create your animation as single or multiple tween as needed to rotate

continuously (or just to the end in other projects).


Create a new control layer.

At each point that would stop place a 2 frame movie clip.


--------------------

frame 1 Label: On


Stop

Begin Tell Target     Target:  ..

   Play

End Tell Target


frame 2: Label: Off


Stop

---------------------


Before adding any actions to stop you neeed to get the animation to run

continuously. After that is done you need to add the buttons each button

would set all the control movie clip to ON except the one you want it to

stop at. And you also need a Play action.


Give each Movie clip a name with a number following it such as hour1,

hour2, hour3 etc. This makes it easy to keep track of the tell targets

and makes creating a loop in Flash 4 to control all the frames very

easy. If you don't have Flash 4 even if you are going to export to Flash

3, the copy and paste and/or duplicate features will pay for Flash 4 in

time savings in a project such as this.


In Flash 4 if you are a programmer (or get one to help), you could

create one instance of the object (the hand) with no tween. You would

then control its rotation totally with actionscript (reverse is easy)

using the rotate property to turn the hand.


We may have a plug and play for this routine in the future, but don't

have one now.


-----------                               -----------------------

John Croteau

croteauerols [dot] com (mailto:croteauerols [dot] com)

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