Flash Quirks.

We know they are there. Sometimes they are in fact bugs, othertimes they are undocumented pitfalls in Flash … othertimes they are … uhemmm .. user error.

Sometimes I ‘m surprised there isn’t a flash “best practices” type book … (the o’reilly hacks book is more tricks). Moock’s books are the closest I suppose … but, Macromedia should be commended for putting comments into their help docs … I can’t count how many times that’s saved everyone from banging their heads against the wall because something crucial was left out of docs … don’t get me wrong, Flash is a great product, it’s just more involved than most people realize, especially when you try to maximize it’s capabilities.

Anyways … today I encounted the most bizzare Flash Quirk I’ve ever come across … using FMX 2004 … the project entails heavy AS2 combined with timeline … the problem was that a .fla was working perfectly … then I went to add some animation to a couple new layers … so I went in and created a new folder called “Bg” and copied/pasted new frames … recompile, no problems there. Re-test.

The AS stopped working (most/all of it is AS2 bound outside of the timeline) … strange. I went back and rechecked to make sure the assets didn’t overwrite anything in the library … Nope. Try again. Same thing. Really bizarre.

Now I started trying a bunch of things to locate the problem … eventually I moved the empty Sound Folder in the timeline back above the newly created BG layer that houses my new assets. Recompile. IT WORKS! … it’s possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered in Flash, but I don’t have time to investigate … by only moving that empty Sound folder it resolved the problem … sounds like a bug to me … since there’s no reason why moving things in the timeline should cause Flash to break. That is, moving assets in the timeline when they are not even used by your AS … and especially when the assets are just shapes and movieclips (and no the mc’s were not conflicting with anything existing either on the timeline or in the lib!).

If anyone has come across this before, please post below.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.