Macromedia Flash® ActionScript: Training from the Source

Lesson 8. Dynamically Creating Assets Adding assets programmatically lets you build dynamic applications such as the memory game you'll build in this lesson. Although you might be familiar with adding assets to the stage at authoring time...

What You Will Learn In this lesson you will: Attach movie clips with codeAdd new empty movie clips programmaticallyDraw programmaticallyAdd text fields with codeApply formatting to text fields ...

Approximate Time This lesson takes approximately an hour to complete. ...

Lesson Files Media Files: None Starting Files: Lesson08/Start/memory1.fla Completed Projects: Lesson08/Completed/memory6.fla ...

Attaching Movie Clips When you start building Flash applications it is most common to initially add all movie clips to the stage at authoring time by dragging instances of symbols from the library to the stage. That method is appropriate in many c...

Adding Empty Movie Clips Aside from adding movie clip instances of exported movie clip symbols, you can also programmatically add movie clip instances that have no symbol. The createEmptyMovieClip() method, as the name implies, adds a new empty mo...

Drawing Programmatically The MovieClip class defines a set of methods for drawing programmatically. The set of methods are frequently called the Drawing API. The basic methods are fairly simple and they enable you to set a line style, draw line se...

Working with Movie Clips as Buttons Movie clips dispatch the same events as buttons, so you can work with movie clips in the same ways you work with buttons. You can define onPress(), onRelease(), onRollOver(), onRollOut(), and so on, for movie cl...

Adding Text Fields Programmatically You can add text fields programmatically with the createTextField() method. Like the attachMovie() and createEmptyMovieClip() methods, the createTextField() method is a MovieClip method, and it adds the new inst...

Formatting Text You can apply formatting to text using the TextFormat class, which defines many properties that allow you to set everything from font family and font size to kerning and color. The Flash Help documentation lists all the properties ...

What You Have Learned In this lesson you have: Added new movie clips programmatically from library symbols (pages 179183)Added new empty movie clips programmatically (page 183)Drawn with the Drawing API (pages 183187)Used events with movie clips ...