Re: FLASH: Losing animation capability after setting property of symbol

[Brad Bechtel]

Cheri Harder sent me an example of the problem Michael Marcinelli was talking about - when using a movie clip in a series of motion tweened frames, applying an alpha value using the Set Property action causes the movie clip to stop movie and to stop being treated as a movie clip.


This isn't really a bug, but more of a misunderstanding on how a movie clip is affected by ActionScript.  If you apply the Set Property action to a movie clip, it has to stop moving at that point.  Flash can't tell programmatically what Set Property action you've assigned (x or y position, alpha, etc.).  The player doesn't have the ability to figure out that you're just setting the alpha value of the movie clip; it sees the Set Property statement and stops to see what you're going to do next.


Every object is either a "slave" of the timeline or of ActionScript. Objects start out slaved to the timeline.  The timeline controls their properties like x, y and alpha. When you issue a Set Property action on an object, it becomes a slave of ActionScript instead of the timeline.  The timeline can no longer order the object to move or change appearance.  ActionScript is now responsible for controlling the object.


What you're trying to do can be easily done by putting the motion tween into the movie clip itself.  Then you can set the alpha property of the movie clip while it's moving.


Let me know if you have any questions.


Brad Bechtel

Flash QA


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