Calling for help from Inigo Montoya!and Sinfiniti

Still Stumped!!! Gonna eat my PC !!!
If you load an external mc into your main movie can it then be controlled from the main movie?

I need to be able to instruct the loaded mc’s frames from buttons created in the main movie.

Ideally the first frame of each external mc will be blank so that they can load in the background (thanks Sinfiniti) without effecting the main movie.

The main animation then taking place from frame 2.

What instruction would I give to the buttons in the main movie to make the external mc’s go to frame 2 and back to frame 1 when needed.

If anyone has an answer to this…and the ability to explain it simply to someone with the same intelligence level as a side of bacon, it would be great.
Otherwise I am gonna eat my PC…

Here’s hoping…
Ray

Allright… ready? I’ll start from the beginning only for the sake of others.

create mc with nothing in it.

place the empty mc on your stage… it will look like a circle with a + in the middle (if selected), or just a circle (if not selected).

Name the instance “empty”. (This can be done with actionscript, but let’s not complicate this for right now).

The movie you will load will load into the empty movie clip and will acquire it’s main properties. (value of _x, _y, etc.).

I created a button called Load. I added the actions for this button:



on(release){
	loadMovie("framestest.swf","empty");
}

this code loads the swf called “frametest.swf” into my movie clip on the stage which is called “empty”. Easy?

Okay… now when we click on the button a movie will load. This movie is now called… “empty”.

If I want to control the frames inside of a loaded MC in my timeline, I can do so like this…

movieclipname.gotoAndPlay(frame)
movieclipname.gotoAndStop(stop)

piece of cake… I’ve included a sample for your entertainment. In my example, the file being loaded has frame labels.

This is simply a way of saying "goto a frame that I’ve called “first” or “second” or “third”. The benefit of doing this, versus saying gotoandplay(framenumber), is that if you ever decide to change the location of your frames (i.e. instead of your movie starting on frame 1 now you want it to start on frame 10), you will have to change all the actionscript that is pointing to a frame number. If you use labels, move your labels when you move your frames, and you wont have to change your code.

one last thing… put all files in the same directory, for simplicity’s sake.

Good luck!

if you can control movie clips with actionscript, you can control loaded movies too!
it’s the same thing, it’s just the path that is confusing sometimes.
:slight_smile:
jeremy