Rudimentary got me stumped

Question

I have 4 movieclips that i am trying to play at different
intervals for a banner I am creating. I have only dabbled with
simple actionscripts but have found myself trying to do a more
complex move then I am currently proficient at.
Aside from making a swf that is 300+ frames long I have
created movieclips of the needed animations and placed them in
single frames on the main timeline.
My problem, is I cannot get the movies to play through the
timeline. It just skips to the end and loops. Where i could put a
pause, or even a wait, it will not play the movie.
could someone help me out with the syntex for loading the
movie, or whatever in the world I need it to say to get it to play
the movies, then gotoandplay a different movie, at a different
label within the main timeline!!!
Or have I got this all bumfuzzled and making it more
complicated then I think it is.
damien

Answer 1

lol - yeah that can happen ;)
ok, first of all you're on the right track. i would suggest
that you place a 'stop();' action on the first frame of each MC you
have created, this will keep the MCs from looping. now you'll need
to make only the 'current' movie visible and make the rest go away.
so now we start to use a bit of code - on the main timeline make a
new layer above the others, select the first frame and open the AS
panel - first thing type: stop();
then (making sure that you have 'instance names' on all the
MCs) point to each by name and turn them off (invisible) like this:
mc1.visible = false;
mc2.visible = false;
now we need to create a 'method' that we can call to play the
'next' clip - but we also need to control the order of play and
keep track of the current clip playing - so we need an array -
place the instance name of each MC into the array:
var clips:Array = [mc1, mc2, ... ];
var index:int = 0;
now we create a method that we can 'call' to advance the clip
order and play the next one in sequence, like so:
function advance():void {
clips[index].visible = false; //turn off the current clip
(index < clips.length-1) ? index++ : index=0; //advance
the index
clips[index].visible = true; //turn on the next clip
clips[index].play(); //play the clip
so, now when each MC is 'done' playing we need to 'call' to
this method to fire off the next one. so go back into each MC, make
a new keyframe in the actions layer (make a layer for your actions
if you have not done so) - on the 'last' frame of the clip - with
the keyframe selected open the AS panel and type:
stop();
MovieClip(root).advance();
gotoAndStop(1);
that should now run through all of your clips infinitely in
succession.