I'm a newbie and I'm having a problem with some flash movie-clip buttons. I've
done as written in the Flash 8 Visual Quickstart Guide by Katherine Ulrich, but
when I publish, the little critters just play and play...just looping the three
states. Whassup? ::confused;

Also can I get a critique on my very first animation?
Thanks in advance,
Dave (click the link below)

http://pierceartanddesign.com/testfiles/

It sounds like they are mapped as movieclips. Click on them on the stage and
select Button in the drop down on the left of the properties panel. Then
right click on them in the Library panel, and in the context menu that
appears, ensure that Type is set to Button.

[quoted text, click to view]

GoDsDoG generously gave::
[quoted text, click to view]

GoDsDoG, that just stopped everything. They don't work as buttons and the over
and down states don't work.

Amy ably added:
[quoted text, click to view]
will fix it.

Amy, thank you...but I'm a REALLY new newbie. I've tried adding it to the
frame labels, and all states stopped...nothing showed except the _up frame,
just as happened when I converted all to "button". I also tried it in the
Actions layer, and that didn't work either. Could you possibly explain a bit
further? Sorry for being a dunce...

Regards,
Dave

Dave, F1 is your friend. If you do not understand how to search the Help, see
David Stiller's post on the subject.
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=01B54

In Help, paste this (including quotes) into the search box:
"Creating movie clips with button states"

There's a good tutorial in there on it. I am guessing that you do not have
keyframes set for your 4 states. That could be why placing a stop affects all.

You can try this sample file too:
http://www.amyniebel.com/samples/movieclipAsButton.fla

Aniebel, I did exactly what it said. I have a stop () on each action, and three
states, one for each keyframe, with three layers (actions, labels, and the
button name). They don't work. May I send you the .fla?

Aniebel,

Yes, I looked at it and compared the two. Just the same, but my graphic is a bit more complex.

Amy,
Sorry for the delsy, just returned from a trip to Dallas. Couldn't upload the
entire thing, but here's the buttons. See the file at
http://www.pierceartanddesign.com/NewFiles

It's set up just as everyone said...stop on each one.
Dunno what's wrong.

Dave

Dave, movieclip buttons will not work like buttons until you give them a reason
to do so. In order to do this, each button has to have an instance name. Once
you've done that, you can place some actionscript on your main timeline in an
actionscript layer that handles the button events (ie: onPress, onRelease).

For instance:


//"button1_btn" is the instance name
button1_btn.onRelease = function(){
//do something;
};
button2_btn.onRelease = function(){
//do something else;
};
button3_btn.onRelease = function(){
//do something else;
};

Amy,
Thank you. It took a bit of doing and expirimentation but I got them going. It seems that they needed the _mc extension? If not, they work anyway.

Thank you _all_ SOO much!