R – Using external movieclips in Flash CS4 (Actionscript 3)

actionscript-3flashflash-cs4

I'm building a Flash CS4 application (AS3) and I can't keep all my movie clips in the library because there will be hundreds of them, and new ones will be added all the time.

Two parts to the question:

How can I externally load in a movieclip to use during run time? After loading I still need to be able to manipulate it as if I created a new instance of it from the internal library.
How can I load a movieclip based on its name?

Thanks!

Best Answer

To load a movie clip at runtime use the Loader and URLRequest classes. Listen to the Event.Complete to know when it is ready to be used.
To instanciate a Class at runtime use the function getDefinitionByName or getDefinition

Look at a complete example (mixing the different concept) in the current doc

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R – What are the issues to be aware of when updating Flash 8 AS2 content for Flash 10

Flash CS4 retains backwards compatibility with AS2 and pretty much all functionality of Flash 8, though transitioning between the two isn't necessarily smooth. If you were to just open a Flash 8 FLA in Flash CS4 and publish it using the publish settings Flash CS4 automatically assigns (Flash Player 10 with ActionScript2), you should be OK.

However, if you are trying to publish your Flash 8 FLAs to FP10 with AS3, you're going to encounter all of the problems you mentioned above. This is because AS3 is not merely an upgrade of AS2, but an entirely different language (OK, not as drastic as that sounds, but you get the idea). A lot of the new features in Flash CS4 (IK, new Motion, etc) won't work with AS2 and requires you to publish to AS3. This is likely the source of your problems; you're trying to combine AS2-only features (in this case, AS2 code) with AS3-only features. To do both, you have to re-write your AS2 code as AS3. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix to do this.

My recommendation is that you go ahead and learn AS3. It may be a bit difficult to wrap your head around coming from AS2, but it is a much more complete language and will last you a long time.

R – Creating dynamic objects for quiz questions Flash CS4, AS3

Like your array of name, new Array("apple", "pear", "grape", "lemon"); you can create an Array filled with Class objects.

var randMcs:Array=[AppleMc,LemonMc,TestMc];
var randomValue:Number  =  Math.random()*1;
var randMc:Class = randMcs[randomValue] as Class;
var myRandMc:MovieClip=new randMc() as MovieClip;

Hope it will help you !

Best Answer

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