COAP:COAP-2110/week4

Week 4 - Monday COAP 2110

Theme: Basic interactivity

Introduction to buttons and some ActionScript

• Topics: Button frame-by-frame animation, customizing buttons, creating your own buttons, creating buttons from bitmaps, etc.
• Previews: Simple slide show, Rocket launcher, Menus with buttons, Image maps with pictures, Buttons with animation
• Handout: Flash button tutorial
• Rocket example: flash-cs6-rocket-launcher-as3.fla

Wednesday

• Using component buttons (easier than "Flash" buttons)
• Creating slide shows (timeline navigation) with buttons
• Previews: Menus with buttons, Slide show with component button menu
• Simple menu-based fla code: flash-cs3-simple-slide-show-menu-fewcode.fla
• Handout: Flash component button tutorial

Homework 4

For those who already turned in 3 homework and wish to have a break: I suggest skipping this one. I will not test button creation in the final. Do homework 5 which is more important.

Assignment

• Create a really complex button and that includes well done graphics and/or animations.
• In addition, create one minor variant of the same button. To do so: duplicate then rename the button you created first (right-click in the library).
• Try to produce nice graphics. I will grade the artwork a bit tougher than for homework 2 !

Reuse of prior homework

• If you wish you can use your previous homework (in any way you like), e.g. include each animation as swf file in a different frame. But this is by no means an obligation nor does it have an influence on grading.

Submission date and format

• To be returned by Monday, at start of week 6 lesson
• Use the following Flash file name project4-familyname-firstname.fla, e.g.

project4-miller-joe.fla

... I must be able to distinguish these files and we want to avoid overwriting.

Other constraints

• Reuse of objects: 1/3 must be drawn by yourself, max. 1/3 imported but customized, max. 1/3 imported as is. (So you also can do everything by yourself).
• You must fill in a document description using the same template as in homework 1.
• Homework projects are individual. If you work with others, make sure that the individual projects differ, i.e. the "reuse of objects" criteria above apply.
• If you reuse old homework, make sure that certain errors are fixed (e.g. use only a single non-editable object in a motion tween)

Evaluation criteria

Same as before (including late submission policy). You can examine the grading rubric in the world classroom.

The document description

Your p4-xxx-xxx.fla file must include a document description.

• Enter a title and description
• See the template

Homework 5

• It is due on Monday week 6
• See the Week 5 program

Event listeners in AS3 compared to JavaScript

This is completely off-topic (do not read if you are not familiar with JavaScript)

The event model and adding Event handlers follows the same logic in AS3 and in Modern JavaScript, based on DOM 3. Of course, JavaScript is not ActionScript since they refer to a completely different "domain", e.g. an HTML element is not the same as a movie clip. Read:

• element.addEventListener (Mozilla manual)
• DOM events (How to create, JavaScript tutorials)
• Event compatibility tables (Quirksmode)