Thanks Jason, Troy, and Paul, for all your help/feedback. Jason, I can't think of a use case for adding frames to a MovieClip either. Unless of course, you wanted to have animations that you could control with AS3, but didn't have access to the Flash CS3 preview. Though, now that I think about it, it seems like there are some interesting possibilities for dynamically generated animations.
Imagine a 'community' site that invited users to create their own animated avatars... or a video game in which the player designs his or her own character... or collaborative animation project in which different artists are creating different parts, maybe even individual frames of an animated sequence... or where a lead animator is creating the key frames, and 'tweeners' are creating the in between frames... you could even track and control this CVS-like, without having to pass around/merge FLAs. Maybe these are pretty abstract, I know... I thought of them just now. The point is, I personally don't WANT to add frames to a MovieClip. But I don't have access to the Flash CS3 preview, and so I was wondering if it was possible to generate AS3/AVM2 MovieClips, in some other way. MovieClip.appendFrame() seems like it'd be easier than the method Troy describes of creating a custom AnimatedSprite class, which will eventually have all or most of the methods of a MovieClip... at least, the timeline control methods. Basically, if I were having this problem 20 days from now... I wouldn't be having this problem. You're right, I'd just make the MovieClips in Flash CS3, export the library into a SWC, and use them from there in my Flex app as I wanted. That would definately be the easiest way. Luckily, I foresaw this problem pretty early on in the project, so I have plenty of time to work on other things while I figure out the best way to handle this... maybe the other things will even take me until the end of April and I won't have this problem at all. In anycase, I appreciate all your help, and offers to help. If it turns out that I need someone to make me a SWF with a few blank frames somewhere down the line, I'll definately be hitting one of you guys up for that. Other than that, I think we can call this discussion closed. Unless someone has more information about it. Although, and maybe this is a seperate post/question in itself, I thought I once heard about being able to control/communicate with AVM1Movies once the new version of Flash came out... I guess that's not happening? NO DYNAMICALLY ADDING FRAMES TO MOVIE CLIPS!! Got it. Thanks all, //Matt --- In [email protected], "Troy Gilbert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Okay, how about the simple scenario where you want the playback of a series > of frames of animation... you know, exactly what a movie clip does? I could > definitely do this by creating a class that extends sprite and in that class > keeping an array of shapes (or sprites) and each ENTER_FRAME event moving my > virtual playhead forward to the next sprite, etc., etc... > > And you know what I'd get? A MovieClip! Looks like Adobe already wrote that > one! ;-) > > Seriously, though, the problem is not that you can't programmatically edit a > MovieClip, it's that Adobe's docs don't make it clear why you wouldn't want > to do that... because the MovieClip is a much more complicated beast that > stores tween details, etc., that aren't exposed in the API (details you'd be > familiar with if you've ever attempt to generate SWF's from scratch in an > open-source tool like I did back in the Flash 4 days). > > The docs describe MovieClips as basically sprites with timelines... which > would lead one to think, "hey, sprite is great, but I need a timeline 'cause > I got some animation, so I must need a MovieClip!" I know this because I > went down the same route. > > What I ended up doing was basically creating an AnimatedSprite class... it > has a currentFrame property, and list of frames (which, in my case, are > BitmapData's). Each frame it increments currentFrame and updates its display > list to include the appropriate bitmapData. Pretty simple stuff... > > So, to address the original poster: MovieClip is just a mirage! Think of it > like its got a scarier name like "CompiledSWF" and treat it like a blackbox. > It'll make your life easier. > > Troy. > > > On 3/29/07, Merrill, Jason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Matt, > > > > So Paul and I discussed our pointless bickering offlist and hugged it > > out. We're good now. Both of us however were just wondering about this > > question you have (me, so I could you, him for academic reasons) since we > > ironically agreed offlist neither of us could figure a good use case for > > needing do do this. Maybe you can explain in more detail what you will do > > with these frames once they are inserted. But really, we probably should > > move this to a Flashcoding list like Flashcoders. > > > > Jason Merrill > > Bank of America > > GT&O Learning & Leadership Development > > eTools & Multimedia Team > > > > > > >
