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Resetting the timeout with no clicks or keyboard input

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:52:05 GMT

Hey all,
SO, I have an RFID reader that is triggering events in a director movie. My timeout is set for 2 minutes, but it is possible for the user to never touch the keyboard or touchscreen, and still be interacting with the program via the RFID interface. How can I reset the timeout timer so that the program doesn't timeout in the middle of the user's activity. I can't seem to find anything in the documentation that mentions it, although it seems there should be some property that I could just reset to 0. Like countDownTime or something like that. Any ideas?

- Bruce

Flash in Director with Touchscreen

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:46:03 GMT

Hey all,
So, I have run into a problem here that an exhaustive search of the web has turned up few answers for. I have a number of Flash sprites within my Director movie, and need them to respond to mouse clicks. On a touchscreen, it seems Flash will only detect the click after the mouse has been positioned over the sprite. So, you have to touch it twice in order to activate it. I know I'll get some suggestions about making the event on the "onRelease" but this does not help. Also, I can't set the touchscreen to detect a click and release when the person touches the screen because I have things that need to be dragged around. I know that there must be some solution, but so far I have had no luck. I have tried to set the mouse location as soon as the mouseDown is sent to the movie, but even then, the sprite needs a second click to detect it. Operating with the mouse works just fine, as one click will do it... A couple other folks who have had this problem, and maybe articulated it better...

http://director-online.com/forums/read.php?1,20690,20710

http://www.directorforum.de/showthread.php?t=52818

http://www.directorforum.de/showthread.php?t=54055

I am pretty good at figuring stuff out, but this really has me stumped. Just looking for more ideas...

Flash 10 Running in FullScreen freezes

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:43:24 GMT

Ok,
I have had an issue come up a couple times with publishing a stand-alone projector with Flash Player 10. When running in fullscreen mode, the visual of the program will freeze occasionally. The program actually continues to run in the background, and respond to clicks, but you can't see it happen. If you escape out of fullscreen mode, then you can see the program running, and the result of the touches (clicks) that you couldn't see in fullscreen mode. This is a stand alone kiosk and needs to be stable, but I can't seem to figure out what this is happening. This isn't when running FLVs, as most of the other posts have asked about. So, has anyone else had this problem or have any ideas what could be causing it. The strangest part is that the program continues to run, but the screen just doesn't update. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

- B

Understanding removeChild(), delete, etc.

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:50:09 GMT

Hey all,
I'll try to explain the general operation of my program, and that might shed some light on my issue. I have a menu with 50 different small postcards. When one is chosen, the program zooms it up in order to fill the screen, populates some data which is unique to each postcard, and "flips" it so you can see the writing on the back. The postcard is a movieclip which imports a front image, 3 back images, and some XML text. There are some buttons on the "back" of the postcard to choose to look at a few images and text. When you choose to close the postcard, it flies away. I use the same movieclip for all 50 postcards, and just change the images and text that I load.

Once the postcard flies away, I want to remove it from memory. It won't happen with removeChild() as that keeps it there in case I want to reference it again I guess, and I have tried setting the postcard variable name to "null" without much success. I add listeners to the buttons on the postcard when I instantiate its class, so I am not sure if I have to remove them in order to get the garbage collector to deal with it. But, I also don't know what I don't know about removing things from memory. In one section of the Flash docs (Working with display object containers) it says:

"The removeChild() and removeChildAt() methods do not delete a display object instance entirely. They simply remove it from the child list of the container. The instance can still be referenced by another variable. (Use the delete operator to completely remove an object.)"

And, at another place in the docs (the script reference about removeChild()) it says:

"Removes the specified child DisplayObject instance from the child list of the DisplayObjectContainer instance. The parent property of the removed child is set to null , and the object is garbage collected if no other references to the child exist. The index positions of any display objects above the child in the DisplayObjectContainer are decreased by 1.

The garbage collector is the process by which Flash Player reallocates unused memory space. When a variable or object is no longer actively referenced or stored somewhere, the garbage collector sweeps through and wipes out the memory space it used to occupy if no other references to it exist."

SO - what happens? Does it actually stick around until you "delete" it, (which I couldn't find any more elaboration about) or will it be removed from memory automatically? All I know is that whatever I am doing, when I watch the task manager, my memory usage goes up by 10MB every time I choose a new postcard. This is a stand-alone program and not meant to be on the web, so the memory usage is probably higher overall, but it should max out I would think if I am doing this correctly. Thoughts?

OK, I am adding on to this. It goes along the same lines, so it should make sense. If my small postcards are a class - SmallPostcard - and when they are clicked on, they create the instance of BigPostcard and add it to their parent.parent, how can I reference that again to make it null? Do I have to refer to the class that instantiated BigPostcard, or from anywhere, can I get a reference to the BigPostcard object and set it to null there? Should I be creating these in the document class script so that whatever a lower class is doing, it only triggers the creation of the BigPostcard, and then passes that job to the document class?

I am pretty good at ActionScript, but have no real training as a computer programmer, so that is why some of these issues come up. At any rate, I'd love to hear thoughts or get pointed in the right direction on this.

- B

Embed AIR Browser Component in Flash, not Flex

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:07:47 GMT

Hey all,

I am using Flash CS4 and would like to use the available browser component in AIR. However, any information I have found online uses Flex to embed this. Is it available in Flash? I was assuming it was part of the AIR architecture, so it would be able to be used in either, but it doesn't seem so. Thanks for any help.

- B

Smooth load of enternal images

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:43:27 GMT

Hey folks,
I have a slideshow that I want to play fullscreen, but there are a lot of photos, so I don't want to load them all in at the start. However, when I load them on demand, the slideshow will freeze for a moment while they load in the background. I know there must be something I can do differently so that these can load in the background, and just fire an event when they're ready, but I can't seem to find what I'm looking for. Any ideas?

- B

FP9 vs. FP10 Drawing API

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:47:07 GMT

Hey all,
I created a program that uses the drawing API to draw a graph of some river level data downloaded from the web. Basically, it will download a TAB delimited file, parse it, and draw a graph of the past 7 days using solid rectangles. The graph draws on by setting some timeouts and tweening the rectangles on so they slide up from the bottom. When it runs well, it appears as if the graph is flowing on from left to right. There are a few different graphs that the user can choose from, and each time, the program reaches out to the web so it can grab the most recent river level data. When I first programmed it, I was using Flash Player 9 and it was working well. Now that I am publishing with Flash Player 10, after a few graphs are drawn, the drawing starts to slow down so that the flowing on is very rough, and after they have looked at maybe 7 graphs, it almost comes to a stop. The graph still appears, but it seems to hang as it starts to draw, and then appears all of a sudden. So, the program is not updating as the graph draws on, but it happens in the correct amount of time. There are a few different methods being used here, with the timeouts and tweens, but since it seems to degrade over time, I feel like it must be something with the drawing API. I am removing the old graphs completely, as far as I know, and only one is drawing at a time. The thing that is puzzling is that it works very well with FP9, but not with FP10. I was hoping someone had some thoughts as to differences between the two that would manifest themselves in a way I am describing. Of course I realize that I could just publish with FP9, but there are a few reasons I want 10 to be used that 9 will not help with. Thanks...

- B

Very large scrolling list of thumbnails

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:32:14 GMT

Hey folks,
I have a photo browser that I am building, and so far it looks good. It loads in however many images are listed in an XML document to thumbnails, and then opens a larger window when you click on them. The program basically stacks the thumbnails on top of one another in a movieClip, and you scroll through with a scroll bar or by dragging the thumbnails up and down directly. My issue is, once that movieClip gets to a certain size, Flash doesn't deal with it well. Let's say I have 100 images I want to scroll through. If I stack them all up, and they are 150 pixels high with 25 pixels padding each side, that's a 20,000 pixels high movieClip, and that doesn't fly. I thought about using a list component, but I need it to scroll smoothly, and not only a cell at a time.
Do folks have any ideas on how to do this? It's really key that it scrolls smoothly, and that it can scroll by dragging photos directly up and down in the viewer. It's easy now because I can have the dragging behavior attached to the thumbnail scroll, and not each individual image, and I can move that one movieClip, rather than tracking the position of all the images. Thanks for any thoughts.

- B

Click through a transparent area of a bitmap

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:33:55 GMT

Hey all,
I am importing some graphics on the fly, and want to be able to drag them around the stage, which all works great. My issue is that if I add a large element, like a border around the edge of the stage, this covers up all the other items so that clicking on them is not possible. I can see them, but when I click, the large item gets the event, even though visually, it is transparent. There are things I could do if I was doing all the development of the graphics in the IDE, but these items load at runtime, so it has to work with bitmaps. Any ideas?

- B

More Memory Management Headaches

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:37:59 GMT

So,
I previously asked about some FLV files that I was loading externally, and having trouble with memory being released. Having sort of solved this, I am having the same problem with loading external resources and then getting them to be cleared out of memory when I'm done with them. I have seen kglad mention more than once that GC in flash 9.0.124.0 is broken, but where does that leave us? I have also tried my project in FP 10, and the memory still continues to go up and up. If I load an external resource - in this case I have a class that builds a VR room with papervision - and then close it, set it's instance to null, my memory never goes down. This is a total guess, but could it have anything to do with using Tweener in my project? Is there any way that the Tweener class could be keeping some of my objects in memory and keep them from being GC'd? I am using weak references in my listeners, setting any variable I can find to null... I can get over how frustrating this is to just see memory go up and up but find no reason. The class I am using also uses a few subclasses to build itself, but I end up with one instance of my VR on the stage. If I have set that instance to a name - myVR - and then removeChild(myVR) from the stage and set the name to null - that should do it right? Boy, this is frustrating.

- B

Rapid loading of external images

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:27:44 GMT

Hey all,
I want to rapidly load an image over and over again. Basically it's from a security camera that has a web server running on it, and it stores the current image in a file called now.jpg. I can do this from AS2 fairly easily as I can just keep calling a loadMovie() on the image, replacing the old one. At one point, I had what looked like 15fps going with that. BUT, with AS3, I can't seem to get this going very fast at all. It takes at least a second to load each image. I am using the code attached to do this. It uses an interval to load, but could be done through other methods. I can run the video out of the security cam into a converter and bring it in USB with the Video() and Camera() classes, but that only gives me 640x480. The camera is actually able to generate 1280x1024 images, which is what I am loading with my AS2 code. So, any ideas as to rapidly load these images? The web server on the camera can display a live image by using javascript to keep loading the image. There must be a way to do it in AS3 if it can be done in AS2 and javascript.

- B

Getting Garbage Collector to remove a MC

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:37:59 GMT

I am pulling my hair out here. I have a movieclip in my library that I load when a user wants to play a video. It has a few elements on it like a back button, captions, etc. But, when the user closes it, I can't seem to get the GC to recognize it as removed and get rid of it from memory. I don't have any references to it, I removed all the listeners, internally as well, I set it's instance name to null... Still, each time it loads, my memory goes up by 50MB (It's a big video) until the machine crashes out of Flash. What the heck am I missing? Do I need to close down the netConnection or something - as I can't find a direct way to do that in the FLVPlayback class. I would appreciate any ideas. Thanks.

As an added note, I am loading this from the library, since it is easier to build it there and not have to write a whole class file for it. So, I have found some stuff in the FLash Player 10 Beta like unloadAndStop(), but I think this would only work with stuff I have actually created a loader instance for right? Ugh.

- B

Flash executable quits with no message

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:45:32 GMT

Hey all,
I have a program that is not "crashing" per se, as I get no error message or anything, but occasionally it will just quit out. Can overloaded memory do this, or perhaps a certain type of error in the .exe. It doesn't happen with any specific behavior that I can tell, but haven't seen the actual behavior every time it has happened. When I programmed in Director, there would be a clear error message from the player about what the error was, but Flash fails silently when acting as a stand-alone .exe player, and when errors do occur, they usually just manifest themselves as bugs or odd behavior, not actually exiting from the program. As a result, I am not even sure where to start looking. I know that I don't have any commands to quit the program in there, as this is a stand-alone kiosk at a visitor center. Any ideas?

- B

Inconsistent external photo loader

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:37:53 GMT

Hey all,
So I have a small photo viewing application. It works fairly well, but at times, mostly when testing in the Flash IDE, it will not load all the photos from my XML. I have done some trouble shooting, and narrowed it down to all the photos (about 15) getting fed to my function successfully. BUT, between there and the listener for the load, I lose them. When I trace out "myPhoto" from this function, I get all the objects I am feeding it...

function loadPhoto(thePhoto) {
var myPhoto = thePhoto;
var photoLoader=new Loader ();
var url:URLRequest=new URLRequest(myPhoto);
photoLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT,photoListener);
photoLoader.load(url);
}

But, on my listener, often only 4 will come through. I trace it out at the top of the function, so I know that whatever I might be doing with the loaded photo isn't causing the issue. I only see 4 "loaded" messages.

function photoListener(e:Event):void {
trace("loaded")
}

Is it possible to try to load external images too fast? I have them living locally, so they are not trying to download, and anyway, I figure they would just cue up if they weren't loading quickly and just eventually download. I have done this type of thing a number of times before, but never seemed to have this problem. Ideas?

- B

Video Captioning Causes Major Video Distortion

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:23:01 GMT

So,
This is a good one. I have a number of videos in an interactive program I'm doing. It's standalone, and the videos are vertically oriented. They'll play back on an LCD screen flipped on it's side and displaying 768x1366. I have it running in flash vertically so that when I play it back on the kiosk, I rotate the display 90 degrees in the display driver. I tried to program this so it ran on it's side, but the transitions and other effects I was doing were much choppier for some reason, so I decided to just go with rotating the display. At any rate, it was all going well until we realized that we needed captions on the screen. I did this in AS3, so I loaded up some XML files, set the caption target to my own text box, and when I went to run the program on the vertical screens, now all the video looks like static and is distorted. I removed my customer caption box, and when played in the default box, it also looks crazy. When I have the display driver set to standard, it looks fine. And, if I remove the caption component from the videos, the whole thing plays fine. I can actually see the videos start to play, and as soon as the captioning kicks in, they go nutty, and the program stays that way. I should say that the videos go crazy, but all the graphics in the program are distorted too, so it's not like the video is the only thing.
I don't really know how to start troubleshooting, and I imagine I am going to have to caption this stuff a different way, but I was wondering if anyone had any insight into how the captioning component works, and why it might cause this type of issue. I realize this is a fairly specialized thing I am describing, so there aren't a ton of people who would have experience with it exactly, but I am not really even sure why the component would cause this. Thanks folks.

- B

Occaional audio distortion on externally loaded files

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:47:12 GMT

Hey all,
I have a couple of interactives that both load sounds from external files. Occasionally, the audio will play distorted, as if it were a very low bitrate, but it is not. The same audio file played again will sound fine, but I can't seem to find any connection between when these files don't play/load properly. Any ideas?

-B

Video buffer amount

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:13:19 GMT

So,
I have an application that is stand-alone and will run on a kiosk. It is running on a vertically mounted monitor at 768x1366. Imagine a set of graphic panels all lined up next to each other, there are 13 of them and each one fills the screen completely. When a button is pressed, all the panels slide one direction or the other on the screen and when the correct panel is aligned with the screen, a video will play in 8 of those cases. The other 5 are just graphic and the do a little dissolve to add some text. For the 8 panels that have video, I load the videos at the start and the first frame of video is what is used as it's static state. So when people press a button and see all the panels go zooming to one end or the other, they are seeing the first frame of video in most cases. Make any sense?

The whole application works pretty well, and on my new XP box, plays smoothly. I am running into a bit of an issue though, as one of the videos is much larger (file size) than the other ones, and I am seeing some performance issues because of it I think. My big question is - how much of a video gets loaded into memory while it waiting to be played? I have the autoplay to off, and only one video plays at a time, so the playback is good. But, the sliding is taking a bit of a hit. Now, I know, It is a pretty processor intensive thing to be sliding around 8 HD videos at once, but it is working well. I am just looking to understand a bit more about how they are loaded into memory and if there is a way to limit how much each video will use. I really only need the first frame until they start playing.

If you have any other video performance tips, I would love to hear them, or perhaps a resource that you know about that I haven't found - let me know. I am running this project in AS2 (I started it before learning AS3) on Flash CS3.

- B

Director, Vista, QuickTime 7

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:28:15 GMT

Hey all,
I know the simple answer to this question, and that is to wait until the new version comes out, which is officially certified for Vista, but I want to know... I have a CD that was created on XP with Director MX2004. It contains a number of QuickTime files with captioning and encoded with H.264 in QuickTime 7. These fail to play on Vista, but work fine on XP. Can I attribute this to a lack of an updated QuickTime Xtra? I assume it is the combination of everything, but maybe someone had some work arounds?

- B

Bit of a slow reaction to MC click and drag

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:31:27 GMT

Hey folks,
So, I have a program with 14 buttons. I have made them movie clips with a few frames, and click will send them to frame 3 or 1 depending... They are created and live on the stage in Flash, but take their code from a Class called ProductButton, which gives them the listeners for click and release. When one of the MCs is clicked on, it moves to frame 3 (making it green), moves itself to the top of the other 13 buttons, and gets a startDrag(). My issue is that often, when moving the mouse fast and clicking, the clip won't start moving until after the mouse has left it. This will cause the clip to move, but there is an offset from the mouse position, and it won't get the release handler properly, since the mouse isn't actually over it. A release of the mouse button has no effect, and the clip continues to follow the clip around the stage with an offset. That part isn't a huge deal, because I can add a listener to the stage to deal with it. BUT, it matters a lot that the clip is not following the mouse, and depending on the offset, the MC could be impossible to drop on certain areas of the screen.

I have removed everything else that happens on the click except for the startDrag(), and I still get the odd behavior. At times, it's as if the clip starts to follow the mouse and be dragged, but snaps back to it's original position and then starts to move again, creating the offset. I have attached the Class code I am using. There are some extra imports in there, because I haven't gotten to everything I need to do. I have tried to strip everything out to see if I can nail down what the issue is. Again, this class is assigned to a movie clip with a few frames, the 3rd being the down state. It's a bit odd, but maybe there is an over-arching thing I am not getting or something. Thanks...

- B

Change movie dimensions

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:59:20 GMT

Well,
The problem is pretty well summed up in the title. For reasons passing understand, a client has replaced a large LCD monitor that was playing a vertical Director movie at 768x1366 with one whose maximum resolution capability for VGA in is 768x1024. I have messed around with scaling the movie with a MIAW and some other methods, but as I imagined, they are of no use, or I can't get them to behave the way I want. Are there any third party applications that could help display this movie properly on the new screen. It is a wide screen, but can't handle the higher resolution, so I am imagining that if I could squish our current movie, then the screen would stretch it back out into a somewhat presentable state. I am aware of the image quality problems that go along with this, but want to give all the options before they decide to go buy a third monitor to do this. Thanks...

- B

Webcams and NetStream

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:16:24 GMT

Hey all,
For the life of me, I can't seem to find what I am looking for anywhere. I want to add a user's webcam feed to the stage. This is a local feed, from their own camera, to their own system. Previously, I would add a new video and attach the video to it. But, as far as I can see that isn't working with AS3, and I need to use netStream, netConnect, or something. I just can't find a simple layout of how it is done properly, and I have struck out on my own. I can usually figure this stuff out, but can someone point me to a simple tutorial, or let me in on the secret? Thanks much.

- B

Certain colors bleeding through mask

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:35:22 GMT

Hey all,
In short, I have some sprites that have been added to the stage and color tinted with AS. When I lay a masked movie clip on top of them, I get some odd color artifacts in the shape of letters of text fields that I have in the masked movie clip. The top movie clip does a reveal, so it's added to the movie with addChild, but doesn't appear until the rectangle mask is moved away. Before it's moved away though, I see some rough green outlines of letters that seem like they are bleeding through the mask. The type in the movie clip is orange, and when the mask slides away, the text appears correctly. I don't know where to start in trying to fix this. The sprites that are on the stage have a blue tint to them, but fade to orange when clicked. The artifacts can't be seen when they are blue, but when they are orange, the green artifacts appear. I can give some more detail if this isn't clear, but maybe some folks know of some reason for this odd behavior right off the bat. Thanks.

- B

January 2008

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:11:14 GMT

So, the FAQ now says there will be announcement in January of 2008. I mean really, I am not surprised at all. No faith in Adobe from the Director community, and this adds to that. Seriously, with Adobe AIR and the capabilities that Flash and Flex are bringing to the desktop with that, it makes investing the new version questionable.

Dynamically calling a certain class

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:31:57 GMT

Hey all,
So I have some animated charts I have done up. They live in my library and are linked with the names; "chart1", "chart2", "chart3." If I want to add one of them to the stage based on a selection by a user, how can I create a dynamic name call to the class to add them. Instead of hard coding them, I want to insert the number into the function. For example.

function createNewChart(myChart){
var newChart = new (this["chart"+myChart])()
addChild(newChart);
}

Of course that doesn't work, so I am looking for the syntax to make it work. Ideas?

- B

Extra line breaks in text loaded from XML

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:42:11 GMT

Hello all,
So I am loading some text from an XML file. It is a couple of lines, and it loads fine. But, the line breaks show up as more than one break. Actually, it seems like Flash sees it as one large line break or something. For example ...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<myData>
First Line
Second Line
Third Line
</myData>

... would show up as what looks like triple spaced lines. I was messing around with the ignore white space, but in AS3 that is supposed to be off by default I think. Plus I am not sure that even applys to what I am doing. Ideas?

- B

Pathing to MovieClips from within a class

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:37:16 GMT

Ok,
So I decided that I was not going to learn AS3 unless I did a project with it, so here I am, pretty frustrated. I am getting the hang of how the classes work, the events listeners, etc. But, what was once easy for me, is proving quite frustrating. My document class loads an XML document that includes 20 items. Each item has a photo, text file, and a few other things associated with it. I extract them and feed them to other classes to do what I need to do. For instance, I have a photo attribute in the XML that I feed to a PhotoImport class. It sizes it, places it on the stage,and adds event handlers for mouse clicks etc. I want to have another that deals with the text portion, but can't seem to direct the text to an already existing movie clip on the stage. I load a file "myText.txt" into a variable, and then want to set a text field on the stage (or an MC on the stage) to that text. But I can't seem to figure out how to navigate to it through code. Using the parent properties to work my way up isn't working, and I can reference the stage, but if I try to reference a movie clip on the stage, that doesn't work. I keep getting AS errors like:

1119: Access of possibly undefined property mcMovieClip through a reference with static type Class.

I dunno, I have found some postings about it, but can't seem to nail what I need to do. I am sure someone out there can help me out. Thanks...

- B

Data binding to a text file

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:58:36 GMT

Ok,
So what I want to do is create a connection to a local text file, so that when it updates, my application will load the new contents. I have tried using loadVars(), but the load time is slow for what I want to do, and it just isn't doing what I want. If I could create some sort of direct connection to the file, I could have it updating my application much more efficiently, and faster, I think. Any ideas?

- B

Rotation shift with alpha tween

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:06:07 GMT

So,
When I am using a motion tween to adjust an _alpha property, it seems like the first frame of the tween tweaks the rotation of the movie clip a bit. I have removed the the tween, the movie clip, and everything, but it still seems to happen. Any ideas? This is CS3 on a PC.

Quick swapping of FLV files

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:16:25 GMT

Hello,
What I am looking to do is swap out .FLV files quickly to create an instant response to an action. Lets say I have a loop of a person standing in one spot, and I have 10 different possible .FLV files that could play. When the user clicks on a place on the stage, the appropriate video plays that walks the person over to that spot. I have tried loading the other files in the background, and using a movie clip with 10 different frames, each with a different flv in it, but that doesn't seem to work. I want to create the illusion of instant response, so there can't be a blank moment before the next .FLV loads. I did have some success if all 10 of the videos are loaded on each frame, with the primary one center stage, and the rest offstage with x at 2000 or something, but if I need to change one thing, then I have to change all 10 frames, and it gets tedious, plus it doesn't seem like the best way to do things. Is there a way to load an FLV into memory so that when a movie clip moves to a frame where the video lives, it will load instantly? Am I making a mistake using the FLV playback component? Should I be coding the whole loading differently? I also will have this living on a stand alone computer, so there is no need to download files, just load them from a local directory. Any thoughts are appreciated, and I have looked at the threads about preloading video, but they don't seem to accomplish what I am trying to do. I am using CS3 but with ActionScript 2. Thanks...

- B

Dynamically author .swf files

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:13:03 GMT

So,
What I would like to do is allow users to customize some aspects of a flash file, and then get emailed an animation with their personal touches. Let's say they can choose a background, a message, and a type of animation. They would input these options into a flash form, and in return, get emailed a .swf with the options they chose. I am just starting on this, an initially I have seen some stuff dealing with PHP, but at first glance, this seems to work in the browser, but not to actually be able to save a .swf in the end. Any ideas on this?

-B

Video Alpha Channel Disappears

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:24:34 GMT

Hey folks,
I have an animation that was starting to get pretty clunky with all the elements happening at once, so rather than use it as a movie clip, I figured I would export it as a video and use it as an .FLV. So, I exported a quicktime with an alpha channel, and then converted that to an FLV with the Flash compression tool. It would seem that you should be able to make an FLV right from the export menu, but that is another issue. So, when I drop the video on the stage, it plays for the first second or so with the alpha channel, and then goes away. Any ideas? My original movie clip is mad up of a few elements that each loop, so when they're combined, they look like rain cloud that is raining and water is rippling in a lake below...

- B

Connect Flash to Serial Port with Local Socket Connection

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:47:29 GMT

Hey all,
So, I am trying to connect a Flash movie to a serial port and have it react to the input coming in. Of course, Flash does not have this capability built in, so I need a workaround. I also program in Director, and there are easier ways to deal with this there, but since there hasn't been an update in years, and for other technical reasons, I would like to use a pure Flash program. I also need to take advantage of some of the new hardware acceleration improvements and horizontal sync issues that come with running the Flash player full screen. So, there are some tools out there that will let me stream the input from the serial port to a web address. I figure I could use the local address and assign a port number, then use Flash to create a local socket connection. I am having issues opening ports on my computer, and a few other things, but in theory, I think it should work. I know that I won't get all the answers here, but if anyone has done anything of the sort, or might know of some similar projects, it would really help. I am more of a Director/Flash programmer, and not so much one on the system level. So, opening local sockets, etc, while I am sure I can figure it out, is still a bit beyond me. Thanks all!

- Bruce

Calling "_parent" while in an XML.onLoad

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:33:12 GMT

Hey all,
So, I have some text fields that I want to fill dynamically based on the information in an XML document. The problem is, I can't seem to find the correct path to refer to other movie clips while I am in the "onLoad" handler. I can hard code the names of the clips in, but that really doesn't help me if more items are added, etc. For instance...

myNode = (myXML_xml.firstChild.childNodes[j]);
myNodeName = (myNode.nodeName);
this[myNodeName+"_text"].general_txt1.text = beigeText;

will not work. If I hard code in the name of the movie clip (which I am trying to get to with "this[myNodeName+"_text"]) then I can make it work. But "this" is referring to the XML statement at the time, and I can't seem to path out of it. Ideas?

- Bruce Text

Guide layer stops working when I change a movieClip

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:19:11 GMT

Hey all,
So I have a few things moving along a common guide layer. There are 7 objects, and depending on what is happening on screen, i want to have some of the objects appear and disappear. I have all of the objects _alpha set to 0, but when something triggers it, I change a few of them to _alpha=100. The problem is that, at that point, they stop moving along the guide. I know they move because they will be halfway across the screen, but then stop moving immediately after I call the change in _alpha. Any ideas? Can you not change the properties of a movieClip while it is moving on the guide? Thanks...

Multiple sounds, Multiple Frustrations

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:33:55 GMT

Hey all,
I haven't gotten any responses to my previous sound questions, but I assume that is because the answer is obvious and I should know better. However, I am still struggling. I have a few basic questions that make up my lack of understanding of sound in flash. An example is... I have a narrator reading off questions of a quiz. The first time I create the sound object "narrationSound", I have him read an intro. Next, it needs to move on to the first question, etc. I try to detect when the sound ends by using onSoundComplete, which works once it seems. I do use the same sound ID for the next sound, so perhaps I am not deleting the first one properly. I don't want to create a new sound ID for every sound, because the sounds are played on the fly, and could come up in any order. It would be hard to keep checking for the end of every sound, even if only one of 50 were playing. I pasted some code in an earlier post, but have since been changing mine to try different stuff. I think there is an overall understanding of how sound works that I just don't have. I come from Director where you can assign sounds to a sound channel, and when you replace the sound in the channel with a new one, the old one stops and new one starts. So you could control narration by just dealing with one sound channel. I would like to try to do this on some level with the sound ID. Any thoughts?

Multiple sounds, One sound object.

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:07:55 GMT

So,
What I want to do is load in a narrative, based on what a person is doing in a game. I create a sound object, load in a sound and play it. But, once the user does something, i want to stop that sound and start up another sound. I don't want to use stopAllSounds() because of sound effects and what not. I made a custom function. The way my head tells me this will work is that when I cue one sound, it will start playing, and if I cue another by calling playSound(), it will destroy the old instance (because it is stopping it and clearing it by creating a new sound with the same name) and start playing my new sound. What is wrong with my logic here?

function playSound (mySound) {
narrationSound.stop();
var narrationSound:Sound = new Sound ();
narrationSound.attachSound (mySound);
narrationSound.start ();
}

Attach(ed)movie not receiving "onRelease" first time

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:45:16 GMT

Hey folks,
SO, I have a movie clip that I am attaching at runtime. Each time the user clicks a button, a new moveable piece gets attached at the mouse position and gets sent a "startDrag". I have an "onRelease" defined in a custom class that this movieclip is a part of, but the first time I release my mouse after instantiating the clip and moving it, it doesn't seem to receive the "onRelease". When I click it again, it will stop moving. The "startDrag" is defined in the class as well to happen onLoad. Ideas?

Comparison Operators - Wildcard?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:58:41 GMT

Hey Folks,
I am working on some search functionality, and want to be able to create a statement that will compare a string to see if it is included in a larger one. For instance, the user could search for "Bread" and I would want the results to include ["Bread Pudding","Wheat Bread","Cornbread"]. Something like that is proving tough for me,but I bet there is a magic piece of knowledge that I am not finding. Anyone got it?

Putting MovieClips in a Datagrid

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:02:01 GMT

Hey all,
I have seen pretty limited examples of using the cellRenderer to create custom cells in datagrids. Adobe has a couple examples of adding checkboxes and drop down lists, but I really want to drop a graphic in my datagrid. Has anyone out there had any success with this, or know of any resources where I could pull some info. I am usually pretty good at taking a demo and making it do what I want, but I just can't seem to do it. I think what is tripping me up is that the example from Adobe uses a "CreateObject" to make the new item in the list and I just want to attach a clip from the library. Oh well, let me know any thoughts, as I would really appreciate it...

Autosize Text with Filters

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:34:45 GMT

Hey all,
I have been messing around with autosizing some text for about an hour. I realize now that if I remove the drop shadow filter, the autosizing and word wrap work. If I have a shadow, then the text will wrap, but the field will not enlarge to show it all. Does this make sense to anyone. On another note, is there a way to autosize text to fit it onto one line? I am trying to do it with my own custom code, but not having a lot of luck. Thanks...

clearInterval - I'm just not getting it...

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:00:07 GMT

Hey all,
I just can't seem to get the clearInterval to work. I start it at the beginning of my movie, and try to disable it while someone is clicking on a slider. I just can't seem to get it at all. I have even just assigned the actions to two buttons to start and stop it, and once it starts, the button to stop it doesn't work. Perhaps I am just missing a piece of punctuation or something. At any rate - shouldn't something as simple as this work... This is in a frame script.

setInterval(adjustScroll, 20);
//
mcSlider.onPress = function() {
this.startDrag(false, 328, 125, 328, 385);
clearInterval(adjustScroll);
};
//
mcSlider.onReleaseOutside = mcSlider.onRelease = function () {
this.stopDrag();
setInterval(adjustScroll, 20);
};

Multiple Properties for Sprites

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:48:33 GMT

Hey all,
I don't think the title does my question justice. What I want to do is make a pull down menu of properties in my behavior, but have it be dependent on another selection right above it in the inspector. For instance, lets say I have a list of regions of the country, and another list of all the states. I want my behavior to show two pull down menus, but the second depends on what you choose in the first. If I chose "New England", then the second list would contain a list of the 6 New England states. Make sense? My problem is that I can't seem to retrieve a property from the sprite which running the getPropertyDescriptionList handler. Just to let you know what doesn't work...

Line limit on text members?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:40:51 GMT

Hey folks,
I have about 3400 lines of text in a text member. When I look at it in the text window, everything looks great, but when I place it on the stage, all the lines above #745 are jumbled together on one line. I can still retrieve lines with lingo, so I know it is still holding the formatted data, but it seems when I put this member as a sprite on the stage, that is where the issues appear. I've tried some different display settings for the text box, but it all seems to have no effect. Any ideas?

Image quality when moving bitmaps around the stage

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:09:39 GMT

Hey all,
I am moving an image around the stage, and when it moves quickly, it becomes distorted and displays what I can only refer to as "banding". The image appear to be misaligned for some of the frames that it is moving. I have tried a number of the usual fixes, increasing the framerate, using a less complex image, etc. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas? I feel like I have seen a lot of flash + director movies that have fast motion, slick movement, etc and not appear as what I end up with. Is this something that relates to a screen refresh rate? Thanks for any ideas...

- B

Bitmap animation without image tearing

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 16:20:13 GMT

Hey all,
I am moving an image around, and when it moves quickly, it becomes distorted and displays what I can only refer to as "tearing". The image appear to be misaligned for some of the frames that it is moving. I have tried a number of the usual fixes, increasing the framerate, using a less complex image, etc. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas? I feel like I have seen a lot of flash movies that have fast motion, slick movement, etc and not appear as what I end up with. Thanks for any ideas...

- B

Wide flash movie is cut off on right side.

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:25:36 GMT

Ok,
So I have a flash movie in Director that I am moving back and forth across the stage. The short explanation is that there are viewer goggles in the middle of the stage that show a zoomed in version of the same flash movie. My problem is this - the right side of the large flash movie I am moving back and forth seems to cut off the right end of the graphic. About 250 pixels or so. I tried making the graphic in the flash movie smaller, and leaving some slop there so that if it was cutting off the movie, it wouldn't get the graphics, but it seems to be still happening. While experimenting more, I found that if I was viewing my director movie at 100% then it is cut off - but at 50% or smaller, it showed my missing graphics. Any ideas? I realize the problem could be in the flash movie, but I don't have any masks or anything in it, and it is very simple. Of note, I have the flash movie close to the max width, but have stretched it to put it on the director stage. Pretty annoying.

- Bruce

DVD Member finding wrong folder

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 16:37:46 GMT

I am using DMX 2004, and trying to author a movie with two DVD members. For some reason, after I import both of them, set the folder property, and attempt to play them, they both play the same content. I have imported one at a time and they both work, but once both of them are in the movie, the won't play property on the score, and the exact same content plays when I try to view them in the DVD window. The two folder are called "Attract" and "Trailer" and the "Attract" is the one that keeps playing first. I wonder if this has something to do with the alphabetical order or something. I am going to mess around some more, but this is driving me NUTS.

- B

When do Sprite Properties Reset?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:36:23 GMT

Ok,
I am not sure why I have never had this problem before, but I feel like a fool at the moment and perhaps it's just because I have been working too long. I have a sprite, (actually 10 or them) that I want the user to be able to move around the stage. They can leave that screen and move to another part of my movie, but when they return, I would like all the sprites to be back where they started, not where the user moved them to. I have a property being set in the sprite about its original location that is instigated at beginSprite, but this is reset each time the sprite starts of course. When I go to a frame of the movie where the sprites don't exist, and then go back, they are not resetting how I would like them to. Is there any way to reset the sprites to their original locations easily?

- Bruce

Imaging Lingo Analyzing Image Object

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:39:56 GMT

Hello,
I am working on a project that involves using a virtual brush to remove "dirt" from an object on stage. I use a behavior that basically creates an alpha channel wherever the person brushes, therefore showing the image below it. I am trying to determine a way to analyze the image to see how much dirt has been brushed off. The end result being I need to have the program act certain ways if there has been a good amount of dirt removed, and another way, if they have not brushed off the objects enough. Any ideas?

- B