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.

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.