Flash 101 (part 6): The Final Countdown - The Scenic Route (
Page 7 of 7 )
In the best traditions of
Broadway, Flash allows you to divide a movie into "scenes", independent
sequences which are played back one after the other. Scenes comes in handy when
you need to organize your Flash movie into different sections.
You can
add a new Scene via the Window -> Panels -> Scene panel; this is also the
place to go if you need to remove a scene from the movie, or alter the order in
which the scenes are played out.
Flash also
allows you to use ActionScript (specifically, the Go To action) to add
interactivity to your movie by jumping to specific scenes in response to user
input.
Finally, Flash also allows you to share the symbols you create in
one Flash movie with other Flash movies, a capability referred to as "shared
libraries". In order to do this, you must mark the symbols you’d like to share
by exporting them; you can do this from the Linkage menu command on the shortcut
menu that appears when you right-click the symbol. Remember to include an
identifier for the symbol as well.
Once all shared symbols have been
exported in this manner, you can save your Flash movie - the shared library will
be stored with it. You can now access the symbols within this Flash movie from
any other movie via the File -> Open As Shared Library command. Once a shared
library is opened, you can use symbols from it as you normally would, by
dragging them on to the Stage.
Note, however, that shared libraries
typically appear in a dull gray colour, indicating that you cannot modify the
symbols contained within them.
When you
publish a Flash movie containing symbols from a shared library, you must ensure
that the shared library is also available to this movie. If Flash cannot find
the shared library, the Flash movie will not play back correctly.
And
that about covers it. Hopefully, you now know enough about Flash to begin using
it for your own animation clips and Web effects. If you’d like to read more and
perhaps learn a little bit more about ActionScript and advanced Flash
techniques, write to me and I’ll see what I can do.
Till next time...stay
healthy!
This
article copyright Melonfire 2001. All
rights reserved.
