Flash CS3 AS2 vs AS3, neither working right.. help!

programming flash
1

So I am working with Flash CS3. I started my project as AS3 but soon figured out that my buttons would not work to jump from frame to frame. So I went to the publish settings, made it AS2. Now I see that my scroll bars in my text boxes are not working, instead they seem to spaz out on the stage when I test the movie.

How am I supposed to have working buttons and scrolling text at the same time? And what other problems am I going to run into in the battle of AS2 and AS3?

2

The problems you’re describing are not due to the programming language.
Either language is suitable for simultaneous frame navigation and scrolling.
Personally, I think you should just start over with a clean AS3 document and forget about AS2; it’s essentially an obsolete language.

Here’s an AS3 frame navigation script.
Buttons are named movieclips wrapped in a movieclip container named "buttonGroup"
Target frames and their respective buttons share the same name.
ie: button “btn1” sends playhead to frame “btn1”

Page is unloaded in the frames immediately following the labeled page frame, in this case between frame1 and frame39.
Playhead is subsequently sent to target frame by the callback function [COLOR=“Blue”]loadPage();[/COLOR] at frame39.
The target frame label is at frame40 in this example.

Add more buttons to the container “buttonGroup”.
No additional listeners or functions are necessary; just add the target frame labels to the timeline, then duplicate the generic frame39 and frame40 keyframes/scripts for each page.

//frame 1 script
stop();

buttonGroup.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, navigate, false, 0, true);
buttonGroup.mouseEnabled = false;
buttonGroup.buttonMode = true;

var button:String = "";

function navigate(evt:MouseEvent):void {
	button = evt.target.name;//value of button variable = the button instance name.
	play();// page unload timeline animation should begin on the next frame
}

function loadPage():void {
	gotoAndPlay(button);//go to frame label that matches the value of the button variable.

}

//frame 39: page unload timeline animation should finish here.
stop();
trace("page is unloaded");
loadPage();

//frame 40: target frame label goes on this frame
stop();
trace("page is loaded");
3

wow you explained that really well. thanks so much!

4

question. how do i make the container for all the buttons to go into. when I put the code i with buttonGroup, it doesn’t know what it is, obviously cause I didn’t make it, or whatever it is you have to do with that…i guess.

5

Here’s how I do it:
[LIST=1]
[]On the stage, create your button movieclips(for now, just create a set of rectangular movieclips, for the sake of simplicity and easy troubleshooting)
[]Give them instance names, such as b1, b2, b3, etc…; keep it short’n’sweet.
[]Select all of your button movieclips.
[]press F8 to open the Convert to Symbol dialog.
[]Choose Type: Movie clip, and set the registration point to upper Left.
[]Name the movieclip “buttonGroup” and click OK.
[*]Give the buttonGroup movieclip the instance name “buttonGroup”
[/LIST]

Your script will now see the buttonGroup movieclip.
The buttonGroup event listeners will “see” each of the nested buttons as separate event targets, via the AS3 process of “event propagation”.
As a result, a single set of event listeners and functions can serve an unlimited number of nested buttons in AS3.:thumb: