Controlling swfs from other swfs.

Question

hi there. the site i've designed has a background layer, a
navigation panel layer(menu) and the content is loaded as separate
swf files on levels behind the navigation panel. to allow for
seamless unload of the content i want to control the transition
from the navigation panel layer.
eg. When the user clicks on "Story" button, the navi panel
layer communicates with the content layer (eg. Welcome page), tells
it to play from frames 50-60 and then unload. After this, the
desired content layer (in this case "Story") is loaded into, say
layer 5.
how do i go about coding this in actionscript? i'm slightly
bamboozled by the actual script for it and i'd really appreciate
some direction.

Answer 1

If you load your movieClips into levels, you simply use those
levels to direct them, e.g. _level5.gotoAndPlay(50)
You can't tell a movieClip to play from frame 50 to 60 and
then stop. I mean you could, but judging from the question you ask
I guess you don't want to get into so much complexity.
You tell the clip to play, and the clip should know itself
when to stop. If you want to be a bit more flexible, you can set a
variable in the clip and check it at certain keyframes via
actionscript:
in the controlling clip:
_level5.stopFrame = 60;
_level5.gotoAndPlay(50);
And in the controlled clip in possible stop frames:
if(stopFrame == _currentframe) { stop(); }
You could enable this for every frame via an onEnterFrame
event handler.
Of course you need to tell the controlling clip to continue
in some way, e.g. by sending it to another frame....
This of course is very linear and old style programming, not
object oriented.
It would be better not to load into levels, but into named
movieClips at certain depths. This allows you to use the
movieClipLoader class, and program all that event-driven.