Movieclip representation

[gi-jones]

I have this general problem: I'm making some menu-like scenes where clickable text appears. I've made the actual text-buttons as movieclips with a text layer and an animated mask, which works fine. The problem is placement in the scene. When the first frame of the movieclip is blank, because the text is not yet overlapped by the mask, the movieclip itself looks blank in the scene while designing, and the only thing visible is its pivot point. That means I have to move it around, then test the movie to see if it's in the right place, then back and move and so on. It's doable but takes forever. Is'nt there a way to define what the movieclip should look like at design time? Maybe specify a later frame of the clip as representation or something?

[Noct]

I deal with this issue quite a bit and there are two ways I usually handle it.
I either copy the content layer to a layer above the mask during design and then delete it when I'm finished, or simply turn off the mask and dump its alpha until I'm done designing.

You could always just set the mask at runTime as well using setMask(), then it would never be a problem:

this.mcToMask.setMask(this.maskMc);

[gi-jones]

Thanks. That was a lot of help in fact. I should propably be mentioned that setMask() doesn't work in AS3. It should be set via MovieClip.mask = maskMovieClip;

Even so, it would have been mighty nice if there had been a way to select a specific frame for representation :(