Flash :: Could Someone Please Give Me Some Advice On This Animation

I Am Stupid. Can Anyone Give Advice To An Idiot?
Hi. I am new to Flashkit but not to Flash. However, this "wack a mole" style game is giving me fits. I can not figure this one out. I will never be a professional Flash Designer at this rate because I suck and I cant figure this out. I have looked at millions of posts in forums but still no avail. I had a full head of hair last week but I have ripped it all out(except for 2 strands like Homer's)

Any and all advice will be taken to heart and taken seriously.

Thank you Flashkit for giving me a outlet to ask others this boggling info.

The Fla. is attached and I am going crazy..........

Duplcating Objects Give Me Some Advice
I have been using the following function to duplicate objects. Is there a better way?

Attach Code

function copy_obj( the_obj ) {
var new_obj = new Object();
for ( var p in the_obj ) {
new_obj[p] = the_obj[p];
}
return new_obj;
}

Hello Can Anyone Give Me Some Advice In Going About Creating Something Similar
Hi, I am very interested in learning how to create something similar to this site :

http://www.fitformaesporte.com.br/

When I mean something similar, firstly, I like the fact that its a pop up window over the top of the main page. I do prefer this, however how did they achieve the popup as the main flash structure. They have a close close cross, which I am assuming they simply added the script fcommand, blah close or exit. But the ability to move it etc. Please I would really like to understand this technique and hopfully apply it to one of my designs, or even the one I am currently trying to correct.

If you do answer this thread please explain in detail the methods for achiving the general structure, or even better provide me with a simple fla example.

Thank you

Trevor Saint

How To Give A Animation Hyperlink
people i made a small
animation
now i have to give the whole animation
a hyperlink how to do that
a text can be given a hyperlink u all know how
but how can i give a animation a hyperlink

Plz Anyone Give Me The Code To Stop A An Animation For 6 Secs
i m calling images and txt externally and there is an animation in images as wel as txt i want to run that animation after every 6 secs. I have used setInterval() but not working.

plz help

Animation Advice
I would like to create a flash movie, however, because I don't know the first thing about flash I feel it would be easier for me to animate the project frame by frame in another application then transfer each scene into flash, attach the sounds etc. However, will this majorly increase the file size?

Advice For Animation
I want to make a site where vines seem to grow up from the bottom of the screen and then curl around the menu.

The first thing that comes to mind as an example would be like the way those plants grew in War of the Worlds.

Any advice or example sites with something like this?

Animation Advice
Here's my problem(well at least one of them):

I feel like I'm doing something fundamentally wrong in terms of animation. I trying to build these long, high paced sequences for our clients... it seems like everything I do chokes the **** out of ANY processor... making the desired effect lackluster. As a frequent browser of bombshocked sites, I'm certain that I'm not attempting to achieve the impossible, but am clearly missing some basic technique which will allow the flash player to smoothly render.

Things I am doing:
- Avoiding alpha effects on bitmaps
- Frame rates between 20 and 30 fps
- Masking instead of fading
- AS motion where possible

Can anyone point me to a book, a tutorial, or just have a couple tips on achieving high energy, fast paced style animation sequences? I know you guys(and ladies) know this stuff, I see it in your work

Thanks in advance..... mb

Help / Advice On Shape Animation
I hope to create a site in the style of Studio-C.

I'm new to Flash MX, and I have the 30 day trial (starting today!).

I wondered if someone could walk me through animating a (pencil drawn) bouncing ball. I figure it will teach me what I need to know in order to move on and improve it...

Jason

Needs Advice On Animation (motion)
I have an animation i'm working on, in said animation, I have a scene where a character is struck from a near head on face to the front view and is then flung near paralel(gah spelling) to the rear of the room..
I would like to do it in all one shot, but it doesn't capture the action I wanted it to.
I fear that I will have to cut to a side view and have this character fly right to left to the wall and not from front to back (not down to up)

If anyone has any tips for creating a better illusion of flying backwards and not just simply shrinking... please share.

[F8] Animation Layout Advice
I'm working on an animation but i'm not sure if i have it set up correctly. I have labeled layers and a couple of movies I created placed on the timeline, but I'm not sure if I've set everything up efficiently or not. If anyone out there would be willing to review my .fla file, I could sure use some help! Thanks!

Animation Optimization Advice?
I have this .fla running. It makes 20 solid-color bitmapdata instances and places a BlurFilter on each. Then each one gets a Tween to move it across the screen, looks nice, but at this point CPU draw goes up to a continuous ~65%. Seems to be an even mix of Tween and rendering the Blur that is drawing all the power, but I'm wondering if there are any tricks that I could employ to cut down the pull on the CPU. Any advice?

I've tried:
-adding one single Blur Filter to the movieclip container holding all these Bitmaps, but that made things worse.
-using a different tween class (TweenLite) that is supposedly leaner than the Tween class, no change at all.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

Animation Advice Needed
I have attached an image to demonstrate what I am trying to do. I was not sure if this should go in AS2 or AS3 as I will use whichever will work. So what I want to do is have these movie clip panels in this 3d layout (as attached) this is a menu so when one panel is clicked the whole bar rotates so the active button is in the central position. I just can't think of how to do it. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks much
-M

Newbie Animation Advice
Hi,

I have what is hopefully a simple question.

I want to have an animation that is 10 frames long but only the first and
last frame is different from the rest.

If I make a clip like that then when I play it do the middle eight frames
use up CPU time?

Or to put it another way what is the mose efficent way of making a clip like
that.

TIA
Wil

Improve My Arm Animation Help? Advice Anything Please
When you click on the gym bar and drag it down the arms move with it. It doesnt look right! The drawing of the person isnt 100% but ive just put the basics in place so I can try doing this arm animation! The arms are inside the bar movie clip.

click here to see the interaction

Click here to see a websites example that looks like it may beable to help my arm animation but Im not sure how to implement these ideas!
On this site you can see a robot arm on the left side of the screen and theres also a tutorial for making an object follow the mouse.
Im wondering if I can merge these two ideas? Make the arm follow the mouse from the shoulder socket?

I also want to show facial expression and sweat coming out of his arm pits! I noticed the robots arm on the example site has white sparks coming out of the side when the arm touches the side. Does anyone if I could use this effect for sweat on my interactive piece?

Please someone give me some advice! Is there an easier way to do what I want to achieve?

Seeking Advice On Optimizing Flash Animation
I would like to call for everyone to share their knowledge in flash optimizations.

One specific question I have regarding optimization is, would it be faster (rendering wise) for us to create a button using bitmap instead of the vector tool if we are going to draw lots of lots of buttons on screen (like a few thousand)?

- boon

Game Advice. Combining Animation & Code
Hi, thanks in advance for any help and/or advice - it is much appreciated.

I have decided to tackle a game along the lines of:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sportacademy/h...00/2190755.stm

As you can see, it requires kicking a rugby ball in between the posts. My question is not specific to this game - but the above game is a good example of it.

How do you coincide/intergrate animation (such as the man running) with the actual kick of the ball? I see plenty of games, that have 'set sequences' of animation, but also rely on physics and 'free movement' such as gravity or elasticity.

I was also wondering about the set up of the game. Are the goal posts actually mathmatically set along the x axis? How would kicking a ball along the z axis work?

Thanks in advance for any advice / help.

Best regards, snapple

Advice/tutorials/suggestions For Working With Music And Animation
I was wondering if there were any good tutorials on making music videos on working with music and animations and synching and doing effects via actionscript and so on.. I did one tutorial which was the most common..

http://www.kennybellew.com/

It covered the basics of creating and working with music but it's still really hard to work with animations and the music at the same time without switching back and forth and A LOT of testing.. Even if there aren't any tutorials i'd appreciate some tips or advice experienced users might have... I'm sure others could also benefit from this thread if we get more comments and suggestions...

Give Me Some Spice And Ill Give You Some Sugar
i need some help,

wats an action script so i can skip to a pecific scene, i just cant seem to do it im trying the on (press) gotoandplay and it wont work

as i said before give me some spice and ill give you some sugar

Some Advice (actually A Lot Of Advice) On Navigating My Web Site
My web Site consists of 1 large flash movie that is being used as a template for the site as a whole. Different 'pages' in the site will consist of the same movie...different colour and content.
ie
Page1 = template/ red/ content A
Page2 = template/ blue/ content B etc etc

My problem is with navigation ( and not knowing enougth about flash )

Choice 1. use traditional hltm with frames. navigation buttons on the left frame call up the a url to load the new flash template.

Problem. Can the call command to load, the url, also navigate to a certain frame within the template?

Choice 2 Make the different pages into different scenes within the same movie.

2A Can the navigation buttons be in a different frame ( web page frame as opposed to a flash frame) and if they can how do I navigate
,or can I navigate as below

Button 1 = load url= www.blah/blah/blah gotoandplay= frame 40

2B the navigation button are in the main movie ( template ) how do I tell it to go to,

button1= go to scene2 frame 30 and play

Lastly!! If I go down the scenes route does flash load the whole movie before it starts playing, this would not be acceptable due to download times, or can it be made to;

1 Load the next scene when it is requested
even better
2 Be made to load the other scenes while the user is looking at the first scene

There will be a large bottle of whiskey ( if your old enougth) for any help that you can give me. Thanks

OK ... I Give Up ... I Need Your Help
Can someone please help me? I've been reading up on and practicing a lot of pop-up windows for Flash 5. I've tried everything. I get it to work when I make a stand-alone Flash movie/HTML page and use JavaScript in the HTML. The code opens the specific image via the button and the getURL command.

BUT, I want to have multiple images within a Flash movie that are buttons and each will open a new window. I can't do that since the JavaScript only allows for one URL at a time as far as I know.

I want to basically make what the band Papa Roach has on their site. You can see it at:

http://www.paparoach.com

Enter the site and click on PHOTOS. Once there ... if you click on any of those names and then the images, they open a new window. HOW are they doing this and making it work for so many images???

Thank you so much if you help me!!!!!!!!

Give Me The Low-Down
Give me the low-down on embedded fonts and html tags. I need to embed my fonts but I can not format my loaded txt file to bold or any other font without changing my text box to using the device font. When I embed the font into flash my text comes up blank. What is up with this! Any knowledge out there on this subject?

I Give Up
Hey,
I give up, flash is too confusing.
Is there anybody out there that would make me a simple flash navigation, all it needs is 12 buttons, i want it to be easy to use but interesting aswell. It has to be horizontal like the one at http://www.ultrashock.com
thanks all
james..

chain_dog_2000@yahoo.com

Can Someone Give Me An Example Of...
Can someone give me an example of an actionscript for moving an object from 0,0 to 100,100 with easing of out 100 in 35 frames and the object is called 'test'?

NaN - I Give Up
This is driving me nuts. I'm using a PHP file to read a number. I want to compare it to a variable and act on a case if it is greater or less than.

The number is read from the PHP file and Trace tells me it is undefined. Parsefloat converts it to a number (at least that's what trace is telling me), and then to test it I subtract a number from it. It keeps telling me NaN. No matter what I do I cannot seem to get this number from the PHP file into a "number" data type.

The sequence goes like this:
1. The var "hiscore" is read // (trace sez it's undefined)

2. Use parsefloat - newnum=parseFloat(hiscore); // (trace now sez "newnum" is a number - so far so good)

3. I subtract a number from newnum and all I get is NaN.

I checked the data type of the number I am using to subtract, and trace tells me its a "number". So I'm subtracting a "number" from a "number" and I get NaN???

Help!
I'll post the full code, movie, sell you my first born, etc, but this is making me go craZY. I've tried new movies, new code, over and over, and I am starting to wonder if something more basic (like a buggy Flash installation) is creating the problem. Most likely it is my lack of experience - but damn, I'm following instructions, advice, and nothing is working! It souldn't be this hard!

I Give Up HELP Please
I have a high stress job and I relax by playing spades online at MSN game zone. At the zone, you can have a spades club, which means you need a club homepage. Yes, I tried to do this. You can see the sorry results at http://www.MyCamelot.info.
Part of the club thing is to compete in tournaments at the zone. If you win, runner-up, or semis, you get what they call a banner. This is just text. This is worth club points. Each club sets there own points and keeps track of all the banners. At the end of the month the member on the team with the most points is the player of the month. Hey, it is just for fun. I am spending all my time counting points and posting banners instead of playing spades.
Would anyone like to take this project on for their portfolio? (and my deepest respect and praise!!! Not to mention saving my sanity). Please!
Thank You

I Give Up...
On my problem. You'd think there would be an easy way to solve this.

I'm using flash to create a movie, which has background music playing (its an attached sound) On the movie I have a button which when pressed, will stop the background music, open up a html file in a pop-up window (which runs a .swf file) which has music in it.

Problem is, when the user closes the pop-up window, I need the background music to start playing again.

Can You Give Me That Fla
If you could, I would like to look at how you got that to work. Can you shoot me over that fla. I would appreciate it.

send it to
sdevall@immixproductions.com

I Give Up
I don't care if this is supposed to be easy. I don't care if I'm just a bawling newbie. I'm a designer, I do design because I couldn't do math. If I could, I'd be an accountant and make more money.

This Action Script stuff is eating my lunch. I don't even understand the tips and lessons well enough to do them, so I'm throwing in the towel.

I have a "radio" that I want to play sound clips in. Got that to work fine, but no preloader seemed to work, so I tried to use the attachSound command and a related preload script I got here.

Now all I've got is a mess. Preloader doesn't work, but the last sound now plays automagicaly without an action and I don't know why.

I'm sure there is some young gun out here who could do this in a heartbeat.

I have no pride or patience left.

I'll give 50 bucks to anyone who can make this piece of cr@p work.

Take any of my files, and send me back a working Flash file and you've got 50 bucks,

If that ain't enough cash then give me a bid. No animation or tricks needed. Just some Action Scripting that works.

Any takers?

I Give Up
I've been working on this stupid bug far too long.

Here's the story: I can't get the pop-down sub menu links to work. Latest development is here:

http://www.transpayprocessing.com/index_v2.html
(click Flash version)

Once the main movie loads, mouse over the links on the top navbar (Home, Merchants, etc). You'll notice the pop-down menus. Those menus are loaded with the attachMovie() command, loaded above the main movie.

I need the links in the those menus to point back to a label in the movie clip "mHomeStart", which is embedded in the root movie clip.

Movie clip hierarchy is like this:
Root > mHomeStart > navbar movie

"navbar movie" loads the pop-down menus via attachMovie() when moused over.

Anyone know how to get the pop-down links to use gotoAndPlay to go to the label "home" in the "mHomeStart" movie clip?

Oh I Give Up
I saw this website and felt that I just had to try and do a site with Flash.

http://www.cartier.com/us/index.html

I have been tying to learn Flash and seem to understand less and less. I downloaded a movie from flashkit and played around with it to see how it worked, then recreated it using my images and info.
Then I did a rough layout of my site in Dreamweaver and inserted the flash movie.
This is it here
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/wilder/

It horrified me to see how huge the file was and I thought that if the viewer had to wait for this to download (for each catigory) they would just leave

So I desided not to show the clothing in a flash file but use html as on this test
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/wilder/dresspages/1.htm
I still felt that I needed to have animation on the page to make it look nicer so I used something I already had as a test (the image scroller) and noticed that then my problem would be that the animation reloades everytime someone clicks the links to look at a different dress. Is there a way to not interupt the animation?

I hope you can see what I am trying to accomplish and maybe there is a better approach to what I am trying to do.
Any advise would be helpful-Thanks

Ok, I Give Up
I would like to dynamically add movieclips to a scrollpane. This will be part of a conditional block: if a then add 'a' to the list, if b then add 'b' to the list, etc.

So I create an empty movieclip 'e' and attach 'a' and 'b' to 'e' Works fine as long as I don't expect it to appear anywhere except 0,0 on the root stage.

The scrollpane ('foo') refuses, categorically, to recognize or otherwise communicate with 'e' Attachmovie fails. SetScrollContent fails.

So I am here to learn the arcane, undocumented method of getting 'e' to become the content of 'foo'

Any help would be appreciated.

Could You Please Give A Little Help?
I need to insert a detection for the number of characters typed into an Input text. Let's say a counter that shows how many characters a user is typing. Is it possible? I'm sorry if my question is silly, but I'm a newbie!
I was forgetting...I use Flash 5.
Thank you in advance!
Marco

I Give Up -_- Someone Please Help
Chocochip and I are making tile/platform engines, and he's doing pretty well, but I'm having some trouble. I have two major problems:

1.)
Here's the way our tiles work:

Code:
/*We create two variables to determine where we
are in the map array. These are rounded up with Math.ceil()
so that our position in the array will always be a whole number.*/

xpos = Math.ceil(_root.Character._x/TileWidth);
ypos = Math.ceil(_root.Character._y/TileHeight);
99% of the time, xpos and ypos are located to the tile directly southeast of it, because both xpos and ypos are rounded up. I dunno, but this is causing my brain to just...fart.

Here's the code for our character's movements:

Code:
if (Key.isDown(Key.LEFT)) {
if (_root["Column_"+(xpos-1)+"/Row_"+(ypos)]._currentframe == 1) {
_root.char._x -= 2;
}
}
if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT)) {
if (_root["Column_"+xpos+"/Row_"+ypos]._currentframe == 1) {
_root.char._x += 2;
}
}
if (Key.isDown(Key.UP)) {
if (_root["Column_"+xpos-1+"/Row_"+(ypos-1)]._currentframe == 1) {
_root.char._y -= 2;
}
}
if (Key.isDown(Key.DOWN)) {
if (_root["Column_"+xpos+"/Row_"+ypos]._currentframe == 1) {
_root.char._y += 2;
}
}
To move down or right, the tile that the character's located at in the array has to be at frame one of our tile movie clip. Alright...since 99% of the time, the tile that our character is located in is 1 tile southeast of the tile he's actually touching, how the hell is that accurate at all?

If there were a wall to the tile southeast of our character, which is where his xpos and ypos are in the array, he wouldn't be able to move down or right, when he SHOULD be able to.

I've tried to add and subtract and manipulate the xpos and ypos in those if statements to see if it'd work, but nothing works. Everything I try has failed.

Please...someone tell me what the hell I'm doing wrong, or if there's an easier and more effifcient way of doing this.

2.)
Now, I've moved onto trying to code a platform engine with tiles. The collision detection is a bit off, but I still went ahead and made it.

Everything went smoothly, except for one problem with how the sprite jumps. Rather than jumping in small increments until he reaches his maximum jump height, he instantly is at his maximum jump height. I've tried using every kind of loop, I've even gone as far as putting an if statement in there so that the character would only move upward once every 5 times through the loop.

Code:
//Pardon the crappy code, I'm just learning this tile stuff. :-|

if (Key.isDown(Key.UP) && !Jumping && !Falling
&& _root["Column_"+xpos+"/Row_"+ypos]._currentframe == 2) {
Jumping = true;
}
if (Jumping) {
x=0;
z=0;
while(x<100)
{
if(z>=5)
{
_root.char._y-=1.5;
z=0;
x++;
}
z++;
}
Jumping=false;
Falling=true;
}
This was probably a very n00bish thing to do, but every time the loop is executed, z is incremented. Once it reaches 5, x is increased and z is reset. I thought this would add to the amount of time it would take for the character to jump, making it gradual, but it doesn't.

Oy....I probably don't know what I'm doing. >_<

Can someone help?

About To Give Up....
Hi,

I've been having trouble with my flash site, so I decided to start over. Unfortunately I'm still encountering bugs. I think it has to do with missing stop actions, but I really don't know because the code looks fine to me. Here is the fla file click here. What's suppose to happen is when I click on the philosophy button under the profile heading the movie jumps from the home scene to the profile scene, but for some reason the movie doesn't always stop and it jumps back to the home scene for some reason. If someone could take a look at my file and let me know what I can do to fix this that would be great.

Thanks!!

I'm About To Give Up
I bought Flash MX 2004 with the idea that there was nothing I couldn't eventually learn, but I may have found my Waterloo.

I bought "Flash MX 2004 for Dummies" and I still can't figure it out!

I'm thinking what I need is a class where I can do a hands on project and follow along with them. That's how I learn best anyhow, but I can't find anything like that online or in a book. (major frustration.)

Does anyone know of a class (online hopefully) where I could learn Flash MX 2004 hands on?

Can Anyone Give Me An Example, Please?
I need an example to understand the "synchronize checkbox" (about synchronize a graphic instance with the main time line) in the tweening motion properties.

Thanks

Susana Robledo

Ok, I Give Up
i'm moving over here from the newbies forum. i hope that's ok.

could someone please right out in simple, easy to follow steps (Flash MX 2004) how to make a draggable magnifying glass!

i am aware of all the tutorials but i can't make any of them work for me, i need some easy to follow steps, please save me, i'm working a movie for my dad and this effect would be cool to 'zoom' on the islands of WWII.

thanks in advance.

Give Me Your Most Used AS.....
Can people tell me what they use for doing projects?

im looking for hints i dont know yet, i mean for example...

getNextHighestDepth is good. I didnt know it excisted till recently and have nver looked back. Anyone got any invaluable methods etc?

Also this problem requires a brain

I have a problem where my menu is building too fast, i need it to calm down for DSL users (just by half a second).

However i do not understand setInterval.

function delay (amount){
whatsThisAllAbout = setInterval (myFunction, amount);
}

thisButton.onRelease = function (){
delay (3000);
}

whatsThisAllAbout???

I have noticed it works if i mess aroudn enough, the menu builds slightly slower, however the next menu section and all others just race through.

Also.

I have a massive function with several nests before it gets to the delay stage. When the delay is complete i delete

the physical movie clip, the onEnterFrame and fire up the next item. I feel maybe my clearInterval does not work as its placed in myFunction

myfunction (){
clearInterval("whatsThisAllAbout");
}

Hmm

Anyways thanks

About To Give Up :( Please Help
Ive spent weeks on my webiste and have almost finsihed it but i keep coming up against problems meaning I am close to giving up.

At the moment my site stands like this

LOVETHEVOID

the portfolio section isnt up yet but all the other pages work.

my problem is this follow this route...

go to portfolio then the fashion and conceptual section.. it opens up fine.. but when you click on the the thumbnails it comes up.. waiting for www.lovethevoid.com and doenst load the movie with the image on. This is weired because it works when I test it offline.

My site has 300 movies all with the different pages on.

Please Please help..

Ugh Im About To Give Up
i have this .fla and i want the missile to follow the circle the circle is moved with the aarow keys. the missile is being stupid arggg!!!! it wont follow the circle correct iv ebeen trying for so long please help someone!!

I Give Up Anyone Want To Take Over?
Hi all,

I'm a London based photographer wanting to update my website but don't have the energy to start again. I have a site which still amazes me considering I never touched Flash before, but now want to simplify the whole thing and anyone competent with the above can probably create it in a day or two.

Me, a photographer as mentioned, am more than willing to offer my abilities for a studio shoot for family pics/model portfolio, party/event shots or anything else you want doing very well. I also have a stock of photo's from Asia which sell for £200 framed, mounted and signed in previous exhibitions and art fairs. If you can help, you can choose and I'll get one to you in exchange. My current site is scotttrindle.co.uk to see part of the collection.

If anyone can help, please get in touch and we can go from there.

Kind Regards and hope to here from you soon.

Scott