Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Lab 9 - Linking to other .swf files




Here is my "stub" Home Page for the 4 maps I have linked for Panning and Zooming. A couple things came up in this lab - the Map reset button on each county map doesn't work. I wouldn't try it, but if you do, then just hit the home button to return to the home page. I tried adding some minimal effects to the buttons also. Oh, if you try and click the flashy buttons they don't work, but the images do.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Lab 8 - Panning and Zooming

In Lab 8 - Panning and Zooming, I used a company map of Fairfax County. I had to resize it from 25 MB to 6 MB to get it to work well in Flash. The thing that threw me off the most was the reset button. I couldn't figure out how to go back to the original size. Also, all my pre-programmed buttons started flashing. I'm not sure if this happened before or after I made them movie clips, but I couldn't get them to stop!

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

German Invasion - Labs 5, 6, & 7

I was finally able to get these German maps together this week and here's all of them together. It took me the longest time to get my little tanks to snap to the motion guides - seen here - Lab 5 - Motion Tween , and once I got that it still took a while to set them all up. The best thing I did was lock the layers I wasn't using while editing different objects. I didn't grab and move my base layer every 5 seconds.
In Lab 6 - Shape Tween, the moving shape was only difficult when I was trying to move the little yellow vertexes between different dates. I was able to change my yellow vertexes to blue, making the selection of them much easier. I also got advice not to overlap the vertex points which really helped.
In Lab 7 - Splash Screen, Links and Pop-ups, I added a splash screen by inserting frames at the beginning of the timeline. I added a button to jump right to the main interactive page, but also added a 3 second delay if the button wasn't pushed. I tried making a separate scene in Flash, and when I did I could not publish them together. I could only make two different .swf files for each and they didn't run together. Whenever I tested the movie it would only play my invasion scene. The links are the title Wikipedia, Wikipedia) and the legend Discovery, both to Operation Barbarossa pages. In the discovery page, they have an animation of the battle with both the German and Russian armies depicted.