Skip to Main Content
Learning ActionScript 3.0, 2nd Edition
book

Learning ActionScript 3.0, 2nd Edition

by Zevan Rosser, Rich Shupe
October 2010
Beginner content levelBeginner
453 pages
15h 52m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning ActionScript 3.0, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Timeline Control

IN THIS CHAPTER

Jump Right In

Playhead Movement

Frame Labels

Frame Rate

A Simple Site or Application Structure

What’s Next?

In this chapter, you’ll learn some basic approaches to controlling timelines—both that of the main Flash movie and the movie clips it contains. We’ll divide our focus into three main areas:

  • Jump Right In. Change the frame rate of your SWF at runtime.

  • Playhead Movement. This includes stopping and playing the file, and going to a specific frame.

  • Frame Labels. Including improved playhead movement techniques without relying on frame numbers.

  • Frame Rates. Changing the movie’s frame rate to increase or decrease animation speed during playback.

  • A Simple Site or Application Structure. We’ll wrap up the chapter by building a project that combines timeline animation with ActionScript navigation. The project can be used as an example template for a multistate application or Flash-based website.

We’ll also take a look at an undocumented feature that allows you to add frame scripts to movie clips at runtime and show you a demo of how to create a flexible structure for a Flash website or application.

Jump Right In

We’ll start off with one of the most-desired features in the evolution of ActionScript: the ability to adjust the frame rate of a file with code. Consider a simple example that switches a SWF’s frame rate between 1 and 24 frames per second, with every click of the mouse. This script can be found in the frame_rate_trace.fla source file.

1    stage.frameRate ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning ActionScript 3.0

Learning ActionScript 3.0

Rich Shupe, Zevan Rosser
ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

Joey Lott, Darron Schall, Keith Peters
ActionScript 3.0 Bible

ActionScript 3.0 Bible

Roger Braunstein

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449398705Supplemental ContentErrata Page