understanding levels in flash

[phebsix]

Goodday pple of the forum,
Please i am a begginner in flash and really want to know how levels work in a flash movie.
Thanks

[Cota]

simply put, they are like pancakes. 0 being the lowest and stacking up. Remember, content in a higher level will sit ontop of lowerlevels. Dont confuse levels with depth.

[phebsix]

Hello cota thank you, but can you please relate that to the frames in a movie.
Is that frame 1 on the timeline occupies the 0 level, frame 2 the 1 level or is it something to do with break down of your movie into scenes.
Thank you

[phebsix]

ok just viewed a tutorial on adobe.com about levels, depth and layers, i now have a better understanding.
Thank you.

[Cota]

Sorry for the delay. Glad you found that tutorial. levels, depths, and layers does get confusing without some sort of visual.

[MaryAnneL]

Could you please post the location of that tutorial? I'm not exactly clear the difference between levels, depth and layers.

Thanks!

[Crimson]

About Layers, Depth, and Levels
Timelines enable you to add layers. If you place content on unique layers, you can then sort the layer
order to affect which content appears in front and which appears behind. You can change the order of
layers by dragging them up or down within the timeline.
Layers are an authoring time convention. Flash Player doesn’t know anything about layers. Instead,
when a Flash movie is exported, it converts all content on layers to depths. Conceptually, depths are similar
to layers, but they are accessible programmatically. Flash allows only one object per depth. If you
add content to a depth that already contains content, the existing content is deleted.
ActionScript enables you to add content programmatically. Because programmatic content is added at runtime,
you must use depths and not layers. Methods such as attachMovie() and createTextField()
that add content programmatically require that you specify depths. Depths are integer values. The higher
the number, the further in front an object appears. For example, an object with a depth of 2 appears in front
of an object with a depth of 1. Content added at authoring time (on layers on the timeline) are placed at
depths starting at –13683. That means that authoring time content appears behind content added programmatically,
assuming you use positive depths when you add that content.
Every movie clip encapsulates its own set of depths. For example, if you have two Movie Clip instances,
A and B, and each contains nested Movie Clip instances, the depths of A and B affect how the contents of
each movie clip appear relative to one another. If A has a higher depth, then all the contents of A appear
in front of all the contents of B, even if the contents of B have higher depths than the contents of A. That
also means that you can add content to A at depth 1 and content to B at depth 1 without one overwriting
the other.
Flash also uses a concept called levels. By default there is just one level in a Flash movie. It has the name
_level0. You can only add levels by loading content using MovieClipLoader or the older global function
loadMovieNum(). In general it’s not advantageous to work with levels; levels are primarily a legacy
concept going back to a time when Flash didn’t have programmatic depths.


-from Beginning ActionScript 2.0 Book-