Flash 101 (part 5): Spiralling Out Of Control - Remote Control
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The basic actions available to you in the Actions panel allow you to add very simple interactivity to your movie. For example, the Go To action allows you to jump to a specific frame, while the Play and Stop actions allow you to pause and resume the animation sequence respectively. You can toggle the quality of the movie with the Toggle High Quality action, or send commands to the Flash player (assuming you're using the standalone Flash player to play back the clip).with the FSCommand action.

In order to illustrate these actions, I've put together a simple animation sequence (you may remember it from one of the previous articles) and added buttons to it in order to allow the user to control the movie. All actions are triggered when the user clicks a button, or hits the key corresponding to the first letter of the command.

The first button uses the Play action, the second uses the Go To And Play action, the third uses the Stop action, and the last one uses the FSCommand action to send a quit message to the standalone player (if it exists).


You can also assign these actions to a specific keyframe - I'll leave you to experiment with this on your own.

You can do a lot more with ActionScript, including writing your own scripts to alter the size, shape and appearance of the objects in your Flash movie; however, I'm not going to be covering ActionScript syntax in this tutorial. Keep an eye out for a separate tutorial on the subject, or take a look at the ActionScript reference guide which ships with Flash 5.

This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.

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