Flash Animation Tips & Tricks - MouseOver Effect and ;Stop Command

[HayTay]

While trying to achieve a mouse over effect in a Flash animation using Xara Web Designer for another thread, I came across several little known items of interest. The first item is the MouseOver Effect, itself, available under the Web Properties > MouseOver Tab > Jump to Frame section (see attached screen capture below). This allows you to jump to any frame of your animation when a user places the mouse pointer over your Flash animation. For those who may have missed that, I said "jump to any frame". Very powerful and very useful.

While I got that to work with little effort, there was an unfortunate and highly disturbing 'strobe effect' created by the animation continuously looping between my two frames. After several tries at fixing it myself I resorted to reading the XWD Help file. That's where I came across the other tip (or trick). There is a ;Stop Command that can be appended to the Frame name (ie. MouseOff;Stop) to stop the animation on that frame (again, see the attached screen capture below). That did the trick as you can see from the following two frame Flash animation.


How cool is that? And, now that you know how too, it's very easy.

There are all kinds of tidbits and goodies in the XWD Help file under the heading Flash Animations. The ;Stop Command and MouseOver Effect information that helped me fix my animation came from the Advanced Flash Commands subsection. There is also a BASIC like ;GOTO Command for viewing frames out of sequence. Alas, if you use the ;GOTO Command or ;Stop Command the frames are not tweened.

Needless to say I'll be reading the entire Flash Animations section to see what other tips & tricks can be had.

Let's see what else we can dredge up from the help file. Maybe covoxer can, and will, throw a few lesser known tidbits our way, also.

Cheers,
Harry