Macromedia Studio 8 [Electronic resources] : Training from the Source نسخه متنی

Lesson 11. Nonlinear Flash Interactions

One of the advantages of multimedia is that you can pack a lot more information in the same amount of space as a traditional printed page. In the project you'll begin in this lesson, an interactive map of Dante's

Inferno , the text presented is three pages, single spaced, and yet all the text appears in only two Macromedia Flash screens, using about 20 percent of the space on each screen. This efficiency is possible because only a certain portion of the textthe text that the user actually needsis showing at one time.

Determining which pieces of text the user needs is easy. When she or he clicks on an object, the descriptive text for that object should appear. Before the user clicks an object, a generic set of directions appears, telling the user what to click, roll over, or drag.

Making the movie this responsive by changing the text on the fly, depending on the user's actions, is possible with dynamic text. To create a dynamic text region, you set up a text field, just as you would for static text, but you designate it as dynamic text in the Property inspector. You then dynamically change the text through ActionScript. In this lesson, you'll explore many of the possibilities of user-controlled dynamic text.

Both the text in the Swamp pop-up window and the main text in the scrollbar box are set dynamically, depending on what the user is doing.

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The resulting movie is nonlinear; users can access content in any order they want, skip content, and see content as many times as they like. Creating this open-ended Flash experience is best with a different movie architecture from the linear, timeline-based movies you made in the previous lessons. Nonlinear, interactive movies rely on a low number of keyframesoften just one or twoand lots of ActionScript. Fortunately, as you'll soon see, the ActionScript needed to power the dynamic text in the interactive map of Dante's

Inferno is simple.