There’s a 2 hour show on stickam that happens every week starting at 7PM. I wanted to make a clock that would countdown to each show, then when it hit 0, have it say “On Air Now (click to watch)”. Then after 2 hours, automatically start counting down for the next weeks show. I used the source file from this tutorial
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/countdown.htm
and was able to set it all up in different scenes pretty easily. Basically it’s set up to do the following
- if the show hasn’t started yet, countdown
- if the show has started, display “On Air Now”
- if show is over go on to the next scene
- repeat
each scene is a duplicate of the original except the date is changed
This works but has some obvious flaws. One being that I’d have to manually create a scene for every single upcoming show (it’s been going for 4 years now, no telling if it will ever end). And another issue is that I personally would be responsible for updating it and making any changes to it, rather than the people running the show. They had been doing the show every Wed and Fri, but stopped the Friday shows. If they end up starting them back up, a whole mess of work would be in order to correct all the scenes. Or if they just wanted to add in a special one time Monday show for some reason.
This brings me to my question. I figure the easiest thing would be to make a .swf that never needs to be updated at all, and have all the dates built into an easy to edit xml file. This way the show can adjust the clock on the fly and won’t ever need to even open up flash. I’m just a little confused on what the best way to go about doing this would be.
Some specifics would be great. I’m usally pretty good at editing other people’s code and adjusting it to work the way I need it, but since I’ve got no real template or tutorial to go off of I’m a bit lost.
Attached is the fla file (zipped) in case I was unclear on anything. The original template was done in Flash MX, I’m using Flash 8 on this computer (file should be in F8), but have CS3 on my other computer.
on an unrelated note, I beat megaman x for the 900th time last week :megaman: