ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Chapter 1: A Gentle Introduction for Nonprogrammers

Figure 1-6 shows how your timeline will look after you’ve added the two questions

to the quiz. Notice that we use frames on the timeline to represent so-called applica-

tion states. Each “screen” of the quiz application gets its own frame. Later we’ll add

labels to the question frames and see how this facilitates navigation between frames

within our program, allowing us to display the desired state—in this case, the appro-

priate question—easily.

Initializing the Quiz

Our first order of business in our quiz script is to create the variables we’ll use

throughout our movie.

In our quiz, we create variables on the first frame of the movie, but in

other movies we’ll normally do it after preloading part or all of the

movie. Either way, we want to initialize our variables before any other

scripting occurs.

Once our variables are defined, we invoke the stop() function to keep the user

paused on the first frame (where the quiz starts).

For more complex situations, we may also set the initial state of our application by

calling functions in preparation for the rest of the movie. This step is known as ini-

tialization. A function that starts processes in motion or defines the initial conditions

under which a system operates is traditionally named ...