Chapter 12. Interactivity with Simple Frame Actions

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By default, Macromedia Flash MX plays the scenes and frames of a movie sequentially. The movie opens with Scene 1, plays all those frames in order, moves to Scene 2, plays all those frames, and so on. Sometimes, that's appropriate. But you can also instruct Flash to jump around in a movie, playing scenes and frames in any order you choose.

You tell Flash what to do by assigning actions to frames, buttons , and movie clips. Actions are commands, or statements , that you string together to make Flash perform certain well, actions, such as replaying Scene 2 at the end of every other scene or repeatedly displaying the first five frames of a movie until all the other frames in the movie have loaded. Actions can add efficiency and a degree of intelligence or interactivity to your movie.

Flash provides a full-fledged scripting language called ActionScript for adding actions to movies. You create ActionScripts in the Actions panel, which provides various levels of scripting assistance.

In this chapter, you get acquainted with the Actions panel by assigning simple actions to frames, using Flash's most-assisted scripting mode: Normal. To learn about creating buttons and at aching actions to buttons and movie clips, see Chapter 13. To learn about more-complex actions, see Chapter 15.

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