I’m finally getting around to learning ActionScript 3 and what better way to learn than forcing myself to upgrade an ActionScript 2 project and working on some other simple ones. Over several posts I’ll document what I’ve discovered, mostly as a personal reference so I can refer to them later.
Again, this post consists of notes for myself, but someone else out there might find them interesting.
I’ve used McTween in Flash for quite some time now. It’s a code extension to Flash that makes many animations extremely easy to implement. A newer version called Tweener has been developed, and it obviously took me until now to move over. But after playing with it for a day I can already see it making some things much easier. There are ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 versions of Tweener.
I’m posting this Flash problem more for my own future reference, but perhaps someone else will benefit.
Basically I’m generally wary of using the built-in Flash components, for whenever I get one working, I develop some bugs that have me wondering if I should have created something from scratch. My experience with the “ComboBox” component was no different.
I made a goofy Gilmore Girls video game and then realized I messed something up that causes the preloader to not display right away — defeating the whole purpose of a preloader.
When dynamically loading and playing sounds in ActionScript, you may have correctly set your sound file in the library to Export for ActionScript and Export in first frame. It’s the latter item that messes things up. It seems Flash takes that first frame thing literally and will load those library items even before the ActionScript you have on frame one, layer one — which is usually your preloader code.
In the interest of sharing information, this is the first in a series of “brain dump” posts regarding web design — specifically for folks who are starting a blog.