I think I see one problem… and it’s explination may help in two areas.
This is a section of a post I made for “The best of Kirupa” called “my first movie” or something like that. Read this first, then I’ll go into how this can help you in two ways.
This is related to an example in which we have a ball movie clip which bounces up and down, and inside it, is a movie clip of the ball rotating in place.
The only thing that I wanted to add to the Movie clip stuff was this. Just because you named the movie clips as you created them, does not mean that you gave them “instance” names.
If for instance, your ballRotating movie clip had a stop(); action in the first frame, you’re ball would bounce up and down, as per the timeline of the ballUpNDown movie clip, but it would not rotate. Likewise you could put a stop action in the beginning of that movie clip as well. Since the movie clip ballRotating is inside the ballUpNDown movie clip, it would not be affected by that stop action, and vise versa.
So, lets say that you had a stop action on frame one of ballUpNDown, and one on frame one of ballRotating. If you did a test on the movie you would see the circle sitting there doing nothing. If you wanted to tell these movie clips to do things at various times, lets say by a button, then you would need to give each an “instance” name. The reason for this should be pretty easy to understand… because you could technicaly put three or four, or however many of these on the stage that you wanted… the Flash player wouldn’t know which to tell to do something unless it had a name to reference. That is where the instance panel comes into play.
Lets say that we gave each of our movie clips the same “instance” name, as it had in it’s library. So ballUpNDown, has an instance name of “ballUpNDown”, and ballRotating has an "instance name of “ballRotating”. Each one has a stop action in it’s first frame, AND there is a button on the main “Scene1” stage which we are going to use to make the ball start bobbing up and down, AND rotating.
The button would have a script like this
on(release){
ballUpNDown.play();
ballUpNDown.ballRotating.play();
}
these commands are called “tell targets”. As the name implies, they are telling a target movie clip to do something. In this case, to play.
you might be asking yourself, unless you’re really swift, or already familiar with dot syntax naming structures, why does the second tell target say “ballUpNDown.ballRotating”?
If you’ll remember the ballRotating movie clip is INSIDE the ballUpNDown movie clip. So when we call to it, we need to call first to the movie clip which is on the main timeline, and then add a period, and then the name of the movie clip that is inside of it.
open the library, and take a copy of ballRotating and place it one the stage next to the other ball. Give it an instance name of “ball2”.
now we can call to ball2 directly to make it rotate. Since it is not inside a “ballUpNDown” movie clip, you can’t make this one bounce though.
confused yet? I was at this point.
the point is, you could create a movie clip called “Man” which has in it a five movie clips called “torso”, “armL” “armR” “legL” and “legR”. Each of these legs and arms can be set up with a tween to swing back and forth, but with a stop action on the begining of each of their timelines. Then “Man” movie clip which contains all of these can be set to tween from left to right across the screen.
Now, if you had actions set up correctly, you could have him walk, and swing his arms and legs appropriately, but ONLY while he’s walking. When he stops on the right side of the screen, you can have a commands which tell each of the limbs to stop moving.
The nice thing about this set up is, that the legs and arms will move with the “Man” movie clip as he goes along… so they don’t need to be tweened left to right… only in their swinging motion.
So, in your case, it’s probebly that you have not given your movie clips “Instance” names in the “Instance” panel. This panel is accessed with menu option “Window/Panel/Instance”. The text field in this panel is only accessable if you have a movie clip selected on the stage. (keep that in mind if you open it and find that the field is not letting you enter anything… it’s probebly because you don’t have anything which accepts an instance name, selected.)
Now the second way that this helps you is in the case of these static images that you are making of the engine. Just as you can pull multiple instances of a movie clip to the stage, there is nothing which says that any instance has to be a movie clip.
Try this as an experiment to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Drag your engine movie clip to the stage. Open the instance panel, and in the drop down menu of that panel, select “graphic” instead of movie clip. You will see a few options close (like the instance name since graphics can’t have instance names in Flash 5.) and you’ll see a couple of others open up. There should be an option there which lets you set “single frame” and then lets you set the frame number. If you set any number in here it will display this instance of the movie clip as a static image at the frame number you set.
This is very useful, as it doesn’t add anything to your library… it’s using the same symbol over and over again. This helps a lot in download time when counting k.
I hope this answers your questions… but feel free to ask more if you need.