Flash Tutorial Sites

heggie

Hi, I know of flashkit, but are there any other sites that do good step by step guides with the finished product visible ? thanks in advance.

impr0v

http://www.ultrashock.com/
http://www.kirupa.com/

Are two with some decent tutorials, and if i recall correctly at least some of the tutorials have the source code with them.

There are oceans of tutorials out there to be found using google if you have something specific you want to learn, as plenty of sites will only have a few rather than a full collection.

heggie

cheers for that i'll check em out, what im basically looking to do is to have a bar of links with another bar on them, and when a link is clicked a colour follows the click below it, its hard to explain - basically im trying to do something similar to this - http://www.thanea.com/ars/

impr0v

heh, nothing like setting high standards for yourself.

The basic colour (color in american speak) switch is
easy to do, it only takes a simple few lines of code on each button:

on (release) {
	var my_color:Color = new Color(main_block);
	my_color.setRGB(0x000000);
}

Where 'my_color' is an arbitrary variable name, 'main_block' is the name of the symbol who's color i want to change, and the six digit number after '0x' is the hex number of the color i want to change it to, which i've put on top of the buttons.

You can download the fla from this link, it's an mx 2004 version.

You could also do this via the tellTarget action, i.e set five different keyframes in the main_block clip, one for each color and then use each button to send the main_clip to that frame and then stop.

on (release) {
	tellTarget(main_block){
		gotoAndStop("first");
	}
}

where 'main_block' is again the name of the symbol and 'first' is the frame label i have put on the keyframe which contains that color.

You can download the fla from this link, and again, it's an mx 2004 version.

Obviously there is a lot more to what the site you referred to has done. For one his color change is a fade, rather than an instant change and you could do this via a script which would gradually change the colour, or by using a tween within the symbol and using the tellTarget action to go to the start of that tween rather than to the finished color.

If you want to get into actionscript in any detail i'd advise you to get a book and read up on it, and if asked, I'd recommend
dragslidefade which gives a great introduction to the subject. It's written for flash 5 afaik, but the code will still work. Scripting is harder to get into in the newer versions of flash, with the changes Macromedia have made to the language, and to the actions panel, so it's harder now to use the trial and error method.

heggie

thanks! thats a great help

heggie

hmm looked at your second example which is exactly what i want but it keeps giving me this error - Target not found: Target="undefined" Base="_level0.mc2" i have dont this exactly as you mentioned but no luck

impr0v

Have you named the instance of the movie clip on stage?

heggie

yep, actually is there anyway to do it fading with teh alpha channel ?

buddy

heggie wrote:

http://www.thanea.com/ars/

Wow! I hate some people

impr0v

heggie wrote:

yep, actually is there anyway to do it fading with teh alpha channel ?

To change the colour, no, the alpha only affects transparency. You could lighten the colour, but not change it.

heggie

yep, well i was thinking of having a few different colour boxes then fade them in on release, or just change the tint of it, but how could you code that to fade the tint?

impr0v

Tutorial here about fading using scripting.

As you'll see, it's not easy to do.

For a small number of colors it would just about be feasible, if not exactly elegant, to set the color changes up with a tint tween for each set of changes and send the movie clip to the start of that state change when pressed.

You need x(x-1) tweens, where x is the number of colours. E.g. For three colours, Red Blue Green, you'd need 6 tint tweens set up within the clip
(doing them in the main timeline would seriously contrain anything else you wanted to do):

Red to Blue
Red to Green
Blue to Red
Blue to Green
Green to Red
Green to Blue

Anyway, best of luck, it's your project, not mine!

EDIT: I should really have included the site from which the above tutorial is sourced in my initial reply to the thread. http://www.actionscript.org, it's a great site.