Hello, I've got a situation where animators hand me a clip that has a bunch of frame labels, each representing an animation sequence. At each frame label, I've got labelled MovieClips inside the clip. So, for example, on each frame I have a clip called "character_mc", "talkbubble_mc", "hitarea_mc". The reason for the setup like this is that the animators position the key clips in different ways depending on the state of the character (walking, running, etc.). They like it all in one clip so they can make sure the transitions between the states are smooth.
So, the problem I have is that in AS3, I'll tell the parent clip to go to a frame, and the value of character_mc will return null ... sometimes. This never used to happen in AS2; it always seemed that as soon as I executed gotoAndStop on a parent clip, the stage instances of that parent clip were available to me on the very next line of code. [OR, perhaps I was fooled into thinking this because of AS2's permissive ways (i.e. I was actually calling operations on a null instance)?] What I find strange is that character_mc is not null the line before the gotoAndStop execution. Almost as if the parent clip is in a halfway state ... So my question is, how can I make sure that the instances on the stage are initialized, defined and ready to access? Is there a way to force this? Do I have to create a deferred part of the code and add an ENTER_FRAME event every time I want to access the clip? Or to get away from this, do I really have to convert all of the animators' clips into a structure that doesn't rely on the parent clip's timeline? -jonathan -- -jonathan howe _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list [email protected] http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders

