Controlling movie with mouse location

Question

I am a designer trying to be a flash programmer and I have a
navigation idea that I've been struggling with. I am simply trying
to do this: put a movie on the stage and as the mouse moves closer
or farther from the movie, it plays forwards and backwards. The
movie I made is a circular logo with navigation buttons curling out
from it like a jack knife. My idea is to have the buttons curl out
as the user moves the mouse closer to the logo and curl back in as
the mouse moves away.
I understand the coding concept - calculate where the cursor
is on the stage, figure out the distance of the cursor to the logo
movie, and just go to certain frames in the logo movie based on
that distance.
I have the stage, the logo movie, and even the code to figure
out the the mouse location. But beyond that, I need help. I just
don't know enough about actionscript syntax and although
conceptually this seems like a basic exercise, I really don't know
where to start. If anyone is willing to help, the .fla file can be
downloaded here:
http://0099d33.netsolhost.com/westside-home2.fla
Thanks so much for any help you can offer.
null

Answer 1

You would replace the one mDistance line in your original
with the three I've given you. But if you weren't able to figure
that bit out, you might not be able to figure out how to modify the
whichFrame line either? Do you have a conceptual understanding of
what your code is doing? Being able to read the code and understand
what it is doing is really central to Actionscript. So here goes:
mcLogo.onEnterframe: this is attaching some code that will
repeat at the frame rate of the movie to the mcLogo instance. Even
if there is a stop() on the timeline, this code will continue to
repeat at the framerate set by your movie. By attaching it to
mcLogo your scope will be mcLogo.
In both version the next line (or three in my case) say find
the distance between the current mouse position and this._x (for
example). Since we are inside an onEnterFrame which is attache to
mcLogo, so "this" refers to that time line. So this._x is saying
the _x location of the mcLogo clip.
If you remember basic geometry a right hand triangle's long
side (the hypotenuse) is given by h^2 = a^2 + b^2. (The square of
the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two
sides.) So we are figuring out how far between mcLogo and the mouse
in the x and the y directions. This gives us the other two sides.
So the distance between the mouse and the clip is the square root
of the sum of the squares of those two sides.
Finally since you need to adjust the distance to some scale
of the number of frames you have added to your clip. So your have
some code that makes the distance proportional to the number for
frames in your clip.
As for the second part of your question, "Don't use scenes!"
So that makes that easy. Scenes are great tools for organizing your
timelines when you are just doing some timeline-based animations.
But when using Actionscript there are some bugs and limitation in
scenes and you are only asking for trouble.
So if you have this code say on frame ten with a stop().
There is no looping that needs to happen. The onEnterFrame will
continue doing the animation until someone clicks.
Add maybe ten blank frames after 10 and then on frame 20 put
your new thing you want – perhaps even give it a frame label
called, "home" or "about" or whatever section it is about. Then you
can use:
this.gotoAndPlay("about");
Also don't forget that you will want to remove the
onEnterFrame event because otherwise it will keep running. So you
should probably also include:
delete mcLogo.onEnterframe;