Lab 7 Hints (Splash screens and rollovers)

I've received 2 questions on the splash screens and wanted to pass along these hints:

If you want to do your splash screen in the same scene as your animation, simply highlight all the frames in your animation (click on the top layer of the first frame of the animation, then shift-click on the bottom layer of the first frame, then shift-click again on the last frame of the bottom layer...that should highlight every frame of your animation), then click the highlighted frames and drag them further down the timeline. That will open frames at the beginning of your animation.

It may, however, be cleaner and neater to create a new scene for your splash screen that, at it's end, just plays the first frame of your animation. Just make sure your new scene appears listed before your animation scene in the "Scenes" window (Windows->Other Panels->Scenes). Flash plays the scenes in your movie in the order they appear in that window.

At the end of your splash screen scene, just add a "goto and play" script to the final frame, or add a button that allows your users to advance there on their own.


I also received a question about roll-overs (when everything, even the "hidden" part is "active"):

Double-click on your button (while the layer it's on is unlocked) so you enter the button edit mode. See if you have added "Down" or "Hit" states for the button. The key one here is "Hit" -- this defines the trigger area of the button. Without it specifically defined, it just assumes every element in the button is part of the trigger area. So, the easy fix is to add a keyframe in the "Hit" frame, draw a little box (any color...doesn't matter) over the area you want to trigger the pop-up (probably the text or button, not the popup part as well), then delete everything else in the frame. Just leave the little box you just drew.

Now the popup should only be triggered by the area you designated with that little box you drew in the "Hit" frame.

More questions or handy tricks? Post a comment to this post!