Flash MX Studio

698 Pages·2002·32.827 MB·English

by  Dennis Baldwin, Jamie Macdonald, Keith Peters, Jon Steer, David Tudury, Jerome Turner, Steve Webster, Alex White, Todd Yard (auth.)

Flash MX Studio
Dennis Baldwin
Jamie Macdonald
Keith Peters
Jon Steer
David Tudury
Jerome Turner
Steve Webster
Alex White
Todd Yard
/
Flash MX Studio
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Friends of ED in 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
The authors and publisher have made every effort in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy
of the information. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express
or implied. Neither the authors, friends of ED nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any
damages caused or alleged to be caused either directly or indirectly by this book.
Reprinted October 2002
Trademark Acknowledgements
Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com
ISBN 978-1-59059-188-8 ISBN 978-1-4302-5166-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-5166-8
/
Flash MX Studio
Credits
Authors Author Agent
Dennis Baldwin Chris Matterface
Jamie Macdonald
Keith Peters Project Manager
Jon Steer Simon Brand
David Tudury
Jerome Turner Technical Reviewers
Steve Webster Sally Cruikshank
Alex White Steve Kirby
Todd Yard Steve McCormick
Mike Pearce
Additional Material Jon Steer
Kristian Besley Steve Webster
Steven Williams
Commissioning Editor
Jim Hannah Indexer
Fiona Murray
Graphic Editor
Ty Bhogal Proofing
Cathy Succamore
Editors
Adam Dutton Managing Editor
Caroline Robeson Ben Huczek
James Robinson
Gavin Wray
/
Flash MX Studio
Alex White: Coming from a Fine Art background, Alex once did 'arty' things
with Director and obscure Mac 3D modelling programs, before selling out and
moving to the big city making fancy Flash web sites for companies who could
afford it. He has recently combined creative forces with fellow 'Messenger
Buddy' Jez Turner for their 'ground-breaking' Flatpack Media venture.
Thanks go out to Jez at the 'Poole office', Claire for the countless hearty meals,
and mum for her moral support.
David Tudury: David discovered Flash while interning in San Francisco three
years ago. Since then he's worked in advertising, plug-in development, and
online-gaming. The volatile economy quickly added some breadth to his
experience. He's used Flash for simple animations, web sites, video games, and
as a presentation layer for N-tier web applications. Mostly though, he just likes
playing with it (www.outmoded.com is his playground).
"I need to thank Aaron Piland of www.apakstudio.com for the terrific portrait,
Michael Montagna for helping with possible XML examples, Adam Dutton who
edited (fixed) this chapter, Keith Peters who got me this opportunity, the other
good folks at www.were-here.com, and Regina, my fiance, for understanding
that computer people aren't supposed to sleep at night."
Dennis Baldwin: Dennis' main focus is to stay on top of technology and find
exciting new ways to push the envelope of web development. He currently
maintains a couple of online resources for Flash and ColdFusion developers at
www.flashcfm.com and www.devmx.com. He is also the lead developer for
Eternal Media (www.eternal-media.com), a web and multimedia firm that
offers technology solutions for ministries and non-profit organizations. When
he's not in front of the computer screen, Dennis mainly spends time with his
wife Jamie or can be found skating around the streets of Dallas with his friends.
Jamie Macdonald; Jamie Macdonald works at Relevare in London. When he
finds time he updates his own site www.nooflat.nu.
Author Biographies
Jerome Turner: comes from Leighton Buzzard where his first cinematic
experience was watching Tom and jerry beat the hell out of each other on his
parent's woodchip wallpaper. He then studied Art at Bedford College where he
learnt that photography was cool because you could visit the Fine Art
department whilst your films were drying. Following this he travelled to Exeter,
wouldn't touch the cider, but did wander off with a degree in Media ArtsNisual
Arts, which involved a lot of photocopying and pointing cameras at people who
didn't really enjoy being filmed.
Since then he's moved to Poole with his long-suffering partner Claire and
worked on a number of film and video productions as a production assistant,
camera operator, script writer, boom operator, 1st AD, runner, producer, and
director. Sometimes when he's very bored he goes to the boating lake to film
Canadian geese.
Jon Steer: jon has been working as a web developer for nearly five years after
graduating from Durham University with a degree in Economics. He is Technical
Director of Durham Associates Ltd (www.da-group.co.uk), a marketing
communications company in the north-east of England and admits to being far
happier working with code than with pretty pictures! His main focus is server
side technologies, especially PHP and mySQL, and is always looking for different
ways to put these to work. jon lives near Durham with his wife and two
daughters to whom special thanks go for their enormous support and
encouragement.
Keith Peters: lives in Lynn, Massachusetts with his wife Kazumi. He's been using
Flash on and off for nearly three years now, but far more heavily in the last year.
His personal site, www.bit-101.com, launched in August 2001 and he strives to
keep up with the experiment-a-day schedule. It features fairly simple graphics,
usually relying on math and scripting to build complex forms and movements.
Steve Webster: propeller beanie hat firmly in place, spends most of his time
tinkering with scripting, backend, and Flash technologies, or writing about
tinkering with scripting, backend, and Flash technologies. Being clearly
masochistic in nature, he's been programming since he was knee-high to a
grasshopper and can currently be found plotting his route to world domination.
Mwahahaha ...
As always, I owe a great debt to my girlfriend Nicki for her saint-like patience
while I was once again "that bloke locked away upstairs". Thanks also to the
fantastic team at friends of Ed -you rock!
Flash MX Studio
Todd Yard: After studying and working for seven years as an actor, Todd was
introduced to Flash in 2000 and was quickly taken by how it allowed for both
stunning creativity and programmatic logic application -a truly left-brain, right
brain approach to production - and has not looked back. He now works as
Creative Director for Daedalus Media in New York City, which specializes in the
creation of Flash-based corporate presentations, primarily for clients in the
investment banking industry. His more frivolous work and experimentation can
be found at his personal web site www.27Bobs.com.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Macromedia Flash MX: The Lay of the Land .......................................................... 1
Flash MX Studio: not for the faint-hearted ...................................................... 1
What's on the CD? ..................................................................................................2
Layout conventions .................................................................................................. 2
Start building this movie ......................................................................................... .3
Support ........................................................................................................................ 4
section 1: Site Presentation
chapter 1: Motion 7
Easing out ..........................................................................................................................8
Making a movie clip move with easing .............................................................. 8
Initiating motion with a mouse click ................................................................ 11
Adding a trail to an object's motion .................................................................. 12
Making the trail fade ...................................................................................... 13
Frame-based motion .................................................................................................... 16
Constant velocity .................................................................................................... 17
Swinging motion ...................................................................................................... 18
Scale in motion ........................................................................................................2 4
Managing the motion ..................................................................................................2 6
Using empty movie clips ......................................................................................2 8
Picture navigator ...................................................................................................... 33
Summary ..........................................................................................................................3 9
chapter 2: Formatting Text 41
Creating our own text effects .................................................................................... 41
Creating a typewriter effect ............................................................................... .42
Setlnterval ..................................................................................................................4 5
Creating a text field dynamically ..............................................................................4 7
Typing in .................................................................................................................... 49
A note on prototypes .................................................................................................. 56
Working with textFormat ............................................................................................ 51
Using setTextFormat. ............................................................................................... 57
Application of technique ............................................................................................6 1
Converting Strings .................................................................................................. 64
Advanced text effects .................................................................................................. 67
Calculating the width of a string ........................................................................ 68
Obtaining character positions ...................................................................... 69
Obtaining further data ..........................................................................................6 9
Using the character positions ...................................................................... 72
Using character data for a text fade .................................................................. 73
Further possibilities ...................................................................................................... 76
Creating a random fade ........................................................................................ 76
Enhancing the picture navigation interface .......................................................... 78
Dynamically positioning images and adding text effects ............................ 79
Summary ..........................................................................................................................8 7
Flash MX Studio
/
chapter 3: Drawing API 89
Drawing a straight line ................................................................................................8 9
Drawing a curved line ..................................................................................................9 1
Adding fills ......................................................................................................................9 5
Adding gradient fills ....................................................................................................9 6
A draw square function ..............................................................................................9 8
A draw circle function .............................................................................................. 10 1
Drawing a curve through a specified point ........................................................ 10 3
Making a sample application .................................................................................. 10 8
Drawing .................................................................................................................. 10 8
Shared objects ...................................................................................................... 11 0
Using a shared object .......................................................................................... 111
Saving our picture data ...................................................................................... 112
The fully functioning drawing application .................................................... 114
Summary ........................................................................................................................ 121
chapter 4: Components 123
The guts of a component ........................................................................................ 124
Tooltip basics .......................................................................................................... 125
Live preview .................................................................................................................. 133
Setting up a live preview .................................................................................... 134
What we want our tooltip to do ............................................................................ 136
Making a tooltip appear on rollover .............................................................. 138
Dynamically changing the text inside the tooltip ........................................ 142
Adding an enabled property .............................................................................. 144
Attaching the tooltip dynamically to a movie clip ...................................... 146
Preserving the original button actions ............................................................ 148
Adding the final requirements for the tooltip .............................................. 152
Extra button interactivity: retrieving alpha and brightness settings
with Color.setBrightness .............................................................................. 155
Building our own button component ............................................................ 157
Summary ........................................................................................................................ 161
chapter 5: Taking Things Further 163
The Stage object ........................................................................................................ 163
Resizing the stage with the Stage object ........................................................ 164
More efficient resizing ........................................................................................ 170
Applying motion when the stage is resized .................................................. 173
XML ................................................................................................................................1 85
An XML loader ...................................................................................................... 191
Building the XML loader. ..................................................................................... 194
Preloading the pictures ........................................................................................2 05
Displaying the photographs ................................................................................ 213
Summary ........................................................................................................................2 19
Table of Contents
section 2: ActionScript Interfaces
chapter 6: Introduction to Events and Handlers 221
Some basic definitions ..............................................................................................2 21
Deleting event handlers ............................................................................................2 25
Changing event handlers ..........................................................................................2 26
Passing parameters to event handlers .......................................................... 227
Event driven programming ......................................................................................2 28
Other events .......................................................................................................... 228
Button event handler ..........................................................................................2 30
Keyboard event handlers ..........................................................................................2 33
Event listeners ......................................................................................................2 33
Creating a Simple Game ......................................................................................2 35
Watches ............................................................................................................2 47
Summary ........................................................................................................................2 S1
chapter 7: Advanced Collision Detection 253
hitTest ............................................................................................................................2 53
Bounding boxes ....................................................................................................2 54
Using shapeFlag ....................................................................................................2 55
Using the different types of hitTest ................................................................ 257
Mathematical collision detection .......................................................................... 259
Bouncing ball ..........................................................................................................2 59
World cup pong ....................................................................................................2 64
Distance-based movie clip to movie clip collision detection .......... 272
Look at the size of that thing .................................................................... 274
Multiple object collision ............................................................................ 277
Handling multiple objects in an array ............................................................ 278
Summary ........................................................................................................................2 83
chapter 8: Flash Math and Physics 287
Introducing trigonometry ........................................................................................2 87
Circular motion ...................................................................................................... 290
You looking at me? ..............................................................................................2 93
Motion basics ..............................................................................................................2 95
Uniform speed ........................................................................................................2 97
Acceleration .......................................................................................................... 299
Do you want to go faster? .................................................................................. 299
Gravity ...................................................................................................................... 301
Project #1: Asteroids ........................................................................................... .302
Springs .............................................................................................................. 320
Coordinate rotation ...................................................................................... 325
Ships in flight .......................................................................................................... 327
Project #2: Bounce ................................................................................................ 329
Summary ........................................................................................................................3 39