Incredibly Stupid Basic Newbie Questions

[mwflash]

Sorry to take up bandwidth on this, but I'm brand new to flash, and for the life of me, after having read the manual and MANY online tutorials, I can't find a simple, concise, tutorial on how to do the easiest thing possible: how do you put movie clips into the main movie and play them and which scripts do you use to do this?

I know this sounds ridiculous - but there are lots of little idiosyncracies in placing MC's on the timeline.

For example:

1) You can put any movie clip in the first frame and it will play - but if you put it on the second frame or beyond (with no scripts) it won't

2) When to use the stop command on the first frame (I know this is to stop unwanted looping so a MC will play, and to stop other scripts from executing, but it seems to be inconsistent in it's use from what I've seen)

3) whether to use "gotoandplay" or just "play"

4) when you must use target paths and when you can use just a command on the root level

What I want to be able to do is have several layers of movie clips, control them playing, and ideally be able to stagger when they start without moving them around to later frames etc.

Is this just too stupid for words or have any of you had trouble in this area when first starting with flash?

Also - can anyone recommend a flash expert I could call for tech support (on a paid basis) who doesn't charge $200 a call like Macromedia?

Thanks, I really appreciate the help.

[Eric Jr.]

Welcome to the Kirupaforum ......

1. Once your main timeline is longer then one keyframe, Flash will automaticcaly start to play, from 1, to 2, and at the end back to one.
Meaning if you put a clip on the second frame, its going to keep on playing, so you do not see the ful animation.
Fix this by putting a "stop();" command on the frame you want to stop. You can later resume playback with "play();".

2. Stop stops the current timeline. If you have clips with playing timelines in other frame, those will stop too because the main timeline didn't give them a playback queue ...

3. Goto and play vs Play ..
GotoAndPlay should only be used if you want to start at a frame and play from there, like gotoAndPlay(50);. goes to frame50 and plays from there...

4. You must use target paths, if the instancenames of the objects you want to target cannot be found on the main timeline (which is _root)
Accessing a movieclip called "test" on _root can be done from the maintimeline like this "test.play()"... However, if there would be a clip inside "test", you have to include "test" in the path:
"test.another_mc.play();

Going one level up from "another_mc" (its in test), is done with "_parent"... so to play "test" from "anothermc" you can do this: "_parent.play()" or "_root.test";

You can see _root as a global path, you can access it from anywhere. Sometimes its easier to use _root.mc then _parent._parent .. etc ... Play with it ..