Flash CS4 Professional in 24 Hours- P11: The creation of this book could not have happened without the skill and patience of many, many people at Sams Publishing. Most of all, I want to thank Mark Taber for offering me this opportunity and Philip Kerman for writing such a great book. I also greatly appreciate the efforts of Songlin Qiu for keeping me on track and organized, not an easy task. | Basic Actionscript 291 Actions are instructions. Flash follows each line of code in sequence. Some actions are complete pieces of instruction with no additional modifications on your part. For example you can add a Stop action and when Flash encounters it the playback head stops advancing. However many actions require you provide additional details called parameters. For example an action such as gotoAndPlay requires you provide the additional detail about what frame number or frame label you want to go to. TRY IT YOURSELF Specifying Actions by Using Parameters Now you can try out actions and parameters. You see that some actions are quite simple. The following task is a quick exercise that uses actions and parameters. After you complete it we step back to analyze what you did in the task. In this task you make the last few frames of an animation loop. Follow these steps Make an Action That 1. In a new file use the Text tool to create a text block containing the Loops Part of Your word Welcome. Make sure the text type is Static. Select the block and Movie convert it to a symbol. Make it a movie clip and name it Welcome Text. 2. Insert a frame at Frame 19. Add motion tweening. At Frame 1 move the text offstage to the right. In Frame 19 move the text to the center of the screen. 3. At Frame 20 choose Insert Blank Keyframe. Copy the text at Frame 19 and choose Edit Paste in Place or press Ctrl Shift V to put it in Frame 20. Add a frame at Frame 30 and insert a Motion tween. Use the Properties panel to make the tween rotate one time clockwise between Frame 20 and Frame 30. Test the movie. Notice the whole movie loops over and over. Instead of leaving the animation as is you re going to make the rotation part from Frame 20 to Frame 30 loop forever. 4. You can add actions to any keyframe but instead of mixing scripts with your animation you should make a new layer exclusively for actions. Name the single layer you currently have Animation choose Insert Layer and name the
