FLASH: scaling line segments/ scripting a drawn line

[Catherine Kunicki]

Hi.


I've been successful in making my ellipse scripts work - I have a movieclip

which is travelling on a dynamic ellipse path based on settings of a couple

of buttons which serve as focus and radius measurements.


What I'd like to do is to have the movieclip trace a line path.


I have an old Lingo script which does this via placement of a line object. I

used two castmembers - one was at a 45 degree angle facing left and the

other was at a 45 degree angle facing right. I swapped and scaled these

lines based on the position of the coordinates.


I have an old Hypertalk script which does this too - in that case, the line

was simply dragged from coordinate to coordinate using the line tool.


In attempting to re-make this as actionscript, the Director approach seems

best, although without the ability in Flash to leave trails I have been

dinking around with duplicating movieclips to get the line segments where I

want them.


Therein lies the problem: when I scale a movieclip containing a line

segment, the ink attribute scales along with the width and height.


I'd like to keep the width of the line constant - lets say 2 or 3 pixels

wide.


I've seen a number of the bezier swf's posted by various members of this

list and I wonder if there is a tutorial anywhere explaining how this has

been achieved. 


Has anyone traced a line/shape in Flash 4 or 5?


Suggestions about keeping line segments at a consistent ink size when scaled

would help a lot.


by the way, using and scaling a single ellipse to match the path might work

initially, but I have other scripts I want to use later which will twist

these ellipses into sine waves and figure eight loop-de-loops of various

kinds, so I don't think one ellipse MC will work in order to draw the shapes

in those cases.


any ideas appreciated!


thanks


catherine





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