Topic: Intro To Flash Question

I have recently been using flash, because I have been getting the impression that it can be a bit useful and doing some of the work for you.

What I have now is a simple 3 text button menu. Nothing fancy, just a simple getURL slamdango, with the up,down,over,hit buttons defined. The button system now works great. Takes me to the pages I would like to go to.

With actionscripting being so new to me I am not sure how far I can take this. However I would like to modify these buttons so that when the current page is the same one that the button references the button will show up differently.

The basic concept here would be that I have a button system:

home

uhmmm

I'm going to have to let someone else handle this today - swamped at work.

(Short answer - I don't know!)
(long answer - might have to simulate a button with static graphics and a hit test; some sort of index.of() thingie might be able to be worked in then, but as far as I know you can't directly access the states of a normal button movie clip. Am I wrong? Fig?)

Hey....
I'm not very good a flash...so my way may be really cumbersome...
Could you have two set of buttons for the home/whatever/whatever contained within a movie clip? Then you can use the GoTo thingy to display the correct set of buttons.

I think you can pass variables when embedding the swf file, so you can determine which set of buttons to display (using if/else statements) . I forget how to pass in variables...i think its src="fileName.swf?variable='home'"

I think this should work...but there probably is an easier way...

Thanks I will look into that method!

Ok, let's go about this the simple, non-actionscripty way, using the basic idea that ShadowImage mentioned. Well, not much actionscript anyway...

What I'd do is create three keyframes with stop actions a new layer, one at frame 10, 20, and 30. Label each with the name of a menu section. Now create 3 new buttons, one for each of your sections that has the up state underlined. Place one of the new buttons at the logically corresponding frame label with the other two original buttons.

Now in your getURLs for each button you've got something like
on (release) {
getURL ("page.html");
}

After the getURL add a simple action that just says
gotoAndStop ("bleah");

where bleah is is the frame label of that button's underlined version. When you click any button it should move you along the timeline so that it's underlined version is visible as you're in that section. Make sense?

Chris (who thinks he just wrote a short tute he's gonna put up on GN)

KAIROSinteractive

[This message has been edited by Fig (edited 07-18-2001).]

Thanks for the assistance, much appreciated!

Glad to help, let us know how it goes

Chris

KAIROSinteractive

Couldn't you also embed your button in a movie clip and then use a conditional statement with an attachMovieClip command?

Seems like another option that might work....