hmmm... you have a twisted sense of "simple", I think. Do you have any idea how many symbols there are in there? Anyway, I'm not rewriting the whole thing, so it's staying. I'll post the source when I get done, if you're interested.

eh... well telling a symbol which frame to go to seems simpler to me than that mess of AS. to each his own.

Yeah, I look forward to seeing what you end up with. What exactly are you doing?

Heh..so i asked my mate again, linked him to here, and he told me some stuff over msn, but i closed the window. And since it's chinese to me i didn't remember a specific, technical thing. Altho the major linings of what he told me was sumthing like "yeah, i suppose you could do it like that, but why make it so complicated if it can be done much easier" And that you were "experimenting with difficult stuff when you don't seem to know that much about the basics." Or sumthing. Blah, blah, and blah.

lol, talking shit! haha. Aight, well, that's fine. Poopy bastards.

What I'm doing: I'm making a presentation for my Cisco class. We have to fully network a school, including 1 router, a switch in each classroom, everything inbetween, servers, at least two secured networks (vlans), etc etc. Lots of specifics, like 24 computers per classroom at 1Mb/sec each, expanding to 100Mb/sec in 10 years (we have to plan for 10 years). We're supposed to come up with a solution and then make a presentation of it in class as if we were doing it to a school board. Most people do all their stuff in Visio or powerpoint, but I figured Flash would be a great deal cooler.

Anyway...why'd I do it like I'm doing? Well, the buttons basically HAVE to be actionscripted, to make shit appear and disappear. If you look at the current incarnation, there's 1 MDF, 2 IDFs and a backbone, with 3 buttons controlling them all. I want to be able to mix and match them so we can see whatever we want to. With only 3, I could've brute-forced it and just had a long timeline with alpha tweens and such done easily. However, there's gonna be alot more buttons. There's going to be a button for the fiber from the IDF/MDF to the classroom, a button for all the copper inside the class, a button for the servers (dunno if I'm gonna do all servers as one button or not yet) and anything else that comes up.

Also, I'm going to make the MDF/IDF clickable, which will zoom into it and show the actual physical placement of all the equipment, as well as making each building part zoomable to show a closer view of the wiring scheme. And, finally, there will be buttons (going to different parts of the movie) showing a cost list and the logical topology of the network. Wish you hadn't asked now? heheh

So, anyway, with how much stuff I'm including, using a large amount of actionscripting cut down my work considerably. The alpha tween w/actionscripting was just something I thought would look cool, and interested me enough that I spent some time working with it. I think it turned out pretty cool, personally.

Lol what the hell was that all about. Hehe...from what i understand (which is around jack tho) it seems pretty impressive tho. Even if it weren't, it'll make a good change from the tedious pp presentations. Wish ppl over here were as smart and/or active enough to do that. That includes me. Would sure help to not fall asleep during presentations. (i was planning to rant on the fact that i don't pay for college to see other students screw up in front of the class but i'll let you guys off )


Curious for the final outcome, good "luck" with it.

P.S. Btw Satis, you found any use in that site i recommended to you, or do you keep your hands off that kinda stuff?

oh, I checked it out, but couldn't be bothered to register. heh. What can I say. It's still sitting in my inbox, though, so I might go check it out sometime in the future. Blame laziness. Seeing as I don't have a job (YAY!) I may end up getting bored sometime in the future. Maybe. We'll see.

Far as the PP presentations...yea, I hate that stuff. We had to deal with them ALL THE TIME at my workplace, and they just SUCKED. I hate powerpoint. If nothing else, we'll get points for originality.

Well, you have something that works for you, so that's what counts. You really don't need a massive timeline to do the way I suggested. You only need one keyframe. The whole idea is that you work with discrete units (movies). it only takes about 1.5 minutes to set up the symbol since you can change the keyframes and alpha settings for each item simultaneously. Then it's a simple matter of telling the movie to toggle on/off. If you run into a situation like this in the future, you might want to check it out. It makes handling the logical flow of site much easier.

I agree about pp. I hate that stuff. I read an article where some guy was trying explain the pros/cons of flash vs. pp. He actually based an entire article off of one point: you can't add a bulleted list in flash as easily as you can in power point.

sure you can... just figure out the ascii code for the little bullets and you're set.

To me, PP is the poor man's (or dumb man's) flash. It's bigger, it's uglier, it can do nowhere near as much, and it's not in the least bit protected. Ah well, whatever. Corporations can have their multi-megabyte powerpoint crap and they're 10 gigs of clipart, I'll stick with Flash. I bet my movie ends up at less than 500KB.

Yeah, it's a bunch of bs. Just like access, word, etc. Bloated junk.

I've updated my Flash stuff. Still nowhere near done, but you can see more what I was aiming for. I'm not sure how I could have accomplished all this interlinking of elements without extreme use of actionscript.

http://clankiller.com/cisco

You got some freaky shit going on with that text, but I'll assume you're leaving it for later.

I dunno what is so confusing about my method, or maybe I'm describing it poorly. Not sure what you mean by interlinking...

Each item is a movie symbol. The buttons tell it to go to a certain frame, while telling their own timeline to go to a certain frame as well. Eh... Whatever. Looks good though.

eh, what's wrong with the text?

So....you'd use actionscripting to tell the individual movie clips to gotoandplay various portions of the movie? Basically, alpha in and alpha out? I can see that, I suppose. I don't think it would be any easier... you'd still have to create the same number of movie symbols (everything on there is a movie symbol), but you'd have to animate each one individually, wouldn't you? The way I'm doing it, I don't have to tween anything...not a single actual tween in there. There will be, eventually, mainly because the sheer amount of actionscript is starting to give me headaches.

Yes, same number of symbols. As far as the text, when I go to overview, the text is extremely blocky and scatchy. The rest of the text is fine.

errr... excuse me. I meant show original, NOT overview. Is that a just a graphic? Can't tell with flash. If it is, I'd edit out the text and replace it with something readable.

Yea, that's the original. I don't think I'm even going to use that on the final product... it was more there for my co-conspirator to see what I'd done. I doubt I'll use it in the presentation. That was the original peice of paper they handed us, scanned in and stuff. Hmmm...if I delete that entirely, I bet my Flash movie would be less than 50k.