Topic: Steve's scroller tut (Page 1 of 1)

Hey Steve or anyone other concerned party. I've been working on your scroller tut over at GN and everything is working perfectly except for one thing I am trying to add on my own.

I have a slider and buttons that you can click to scroll. I want the slider to move as you click the button like a normal slider would. I've got it working but it wants to stop every so often as you hold down on the button.

Here is what I've got so far...
http://www.krets.net/archives/scroller.html

The fla file is the same name in the same directory if you want to take a look at that.

Much appreciation for any input you can give me.

The action was smooth as silk for me: Mac, IE 5. Nice job! Especially loved the content


Except .... it stopped scrolling before the end of the text. Wonder why??

Anyway. I've been meaning to get back to updating this tute, using the *much* simpler and more efficient onClipEvent code. For the time being, read one of the best: http://www.bmace.com/uplink/

In his floating navigation thingie, click "options" and then archive, and study the first one, the scrolling text field. Benjamin Mace. Quality stuff.

I figured out why. Its because somewhere in your code you divided by 200 for the length of the scrolling area but my scrolling area is longer and so I need too divide by a larger number.

I'll do a little more workk today and see what I can come up with.

I jsut finished that tut and Im working on the others, funny I started with the so called "advanced tut" first rather than a easier one. hey steve was that tut you did in Flash 4 or 5? cause alot of the things are kinda backwards for me in Flash5. especially when I go to center the a button or something. (maybe it's taxon's tut that is on 4)

[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 10-13-2001).]

Cool. I think I'll have to go check that code out. I haven't even looked into flash 5 action scripting yet. I made something very very similar once with flash 4, but it didn't work quite that well. The little indicator bar would sometimes overshoot the up/down arrows but hey, that was two years ago. But I always had big problems with masks in flash 4, I hope they fixed them in flash 5.

I'd like to get back into flash stuff over this x-mas break....

Dark - my was written in Flash 5, but in the very early days of my comprehension. It was essentially a re-write in Flash 5 syntax of Flash 4 versions I had found in other tutorials. When I wrote that, there were tutorials out that showed how to use the new Flash5 features to get external text into a movie, but the whole clipEvent thing was too new for there to be any teaching materials available to me. The scroll arrows page in my GN tutorial is so very much more complex than it needs to be. The empty controller MCs..... shudder. Oh well. I figure even if this isn't a terribly efficient way of doing things, you'll still learn a lot about ActionScript by doing it. Read the tutorials I suggested to Krets.

In a nutshell, here's the simple way. Make a button symbol to represent your scroll arrows. Make two new MCs, one for "up", one for "down" and put an instance of the button in each. Add code to the button in each MC, something like:
on(press){
scroll=true
}

(this is pseudocode, but you get the idea)

Then in the final assembly (either on the main timeline or in a new movie clip) you put your text field, your ornamentations and your scroll arrows. Select each arrow and add an object action (not a frame action). Again in pseudocode, the down arrow would be something like

onClipEvent(enterFrame){
if(scroll=true){
textField.scroll++;
}
}

and the up arrow would be the reverse:

onClipEvent(enterFrame){
if(scroll=true){
textField.scroll--;
}
}

Okay? Does this make any sense? Code is added to the arrow button MC to collect a mouse event (press, or mouseOver).

Then that symbol, containing the button code, is added to another MC, and that symbol gets an object action which says "if you have received the mouse event you were set to be sensitive to, then do this thing", which is to add to or subtract from the scroll property of the text field.

Much much simpler than what I have in that old tutorial. I really have *got* to freshen it up! At the point at which I wrote the tutorial, the *only* example of this technique was by Colin Moock, and it would hve felt like a blatant rip-off to "take" it. Now it's common place. A lot can happen in a few months!