flash (macromedia): I had three trace statements in a row that printed to the output screen every
frame (while testing from the development environment) - it obviously flooded
the output and was almost impossible to use. It looped for a while and then
appeared to stop printing to the output screen. I stopped the test and ever
since none of my trace statements print to the output screen, whether or not
they print once or loop like the ones mentioned above.. Any ideas what I broke
and how to fix it?

dpk

Make sure the trace actions have not been disabled in the publish settings:

File (menu) --> Publish Settings
Click the Flash tab in the window that pops up and have a look at the "omit
trace actions" checkbox. If there is a tick in it, uncheck the box to make it
clear and then test your movie again.

Cheers,
Gil

Thanks for the suggestion, Gil. Unfortunately the omit trace actions checkbox was not checked in my settings... Any other thoughts?

The only other thought I have is that the trace actions are inside a part of
your application that is not being executed when you test your movie.

eg:

condition = false;
if (condition) {
trace("you won't see me!")
}

Have you tried just putting a simple trace("Hello World") statement at the
very top of your first frame in the movie to see if ALL traces are failing?

Yes, all trace() statements are outside conditionals. I've put them next to
statements that are known to work (like textbox updates, which I can see). It
really looks like a bug to me - is there an official channel through which I
can report this?
dpk

hmmm. I think I'm stumped.

Some general stuff to consider or try out if you haven't already:

- Have you tried the good old "save, shut down, restart and cross fingers"
method?

- What happens if you "save as" a new file and then compile the new FLA?

- Is it only happening on one particular fla or does it occur to all of your
flash movies? What happens if new create a whole new FLA and try something
very simple from scratch in a 'clean' movie? This may help determine whether
the problem is with your fla movie or if it is some kind of error that has
crept into your authoring environment. If it happens on every movie you
create, it might be time to reinstall Flash.

Answer found... This one was definitely worth the stumpers because it recurred
after reboots and across flash projects. Knowing that, I figured it was
something on disk so I checked the directories and didnt find anything. I
eventually found the answer after digging around the registry.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Macromedia\Flash 7\Vector\Output Panel Messages

is the key. It has to be set to 1 for the output panel to work. Somehow mine
had been reset to 0, probably due to my infinite looping trace flood fiasco.
Anyways, thanks for the help - bouncing ideas arounds always tends to fix
things :)

dpk

Nice detective work!
That's a good one to know about for the future.

Cheers,

I'm glad to have a solution, but I'm not so giddy about not knowing how and or
why it got changed.

Will this be a regular task like backing up sites in Dreamweaver to avoid
those periodic and time consuming site definition disappearances?

Anyway, thanks for the fix.

I seem to be having the Output window problem on both my Mac and PC versions
of Flash 7.2. The PC did not have a Output Panel Messages file in the vector
folder and I have no idea how to fix the Mac version either. Any ideas???
HELP!!!

Thanks for this information. It's just saved my bacon!
I also had a large looping problem tracing to the output window just before I
finished work yesterday, so maybe there's a bug there that needs sorting.

Mike