Understang Symbols

[jfharper]

I'm trying to understand how symbols work in relation to swf movies. I get how a graphic symbol works but it seems if you were to add code to a symbol calling an swf file to load and play, it handles this differently. For example, if you create a graphic symbol, put the image on the symbol on its timeline, then add the symbol to the main timeline and animate the opacity fading in and out, this works just fine.

But is you wanted to have instead of an image, an swf file, that would fade in and out on the main timeline, this doesn't work. I've tried creating both a graphic symbol and movieclip symbol, adding code to the symbols timeline for example,
loadMovieNum("mymovie.swf", "GET"); This gets the mymovie.swf file to play, but then when I put the symbol on the main timeline and try to animate the fading in and out with the opacity, it seems the opacity does not effect the symbol properly...in other words, the swf file just jumps in and plays on the first keyframe, even though there is a motion tween set to fade in the opacity. See what I would like is for the swf file that is contained on the symbol to fade in while it is already playing.

Does anyone know if this is possible, because I am having trouble understanding how symbols work and what the limitations are of these symbols.

JH

[fgf]

couldn't open the file to see exactly what u tried to do.

LoadmovieNum will load the swf into a new level (like a layer in the authoring to but created by code when the swf is run) not load it into any previously defined symbol with alpha fades.

What you need to do is
1) create an empty movie clip
2) create the tween with the empty movie clip
3) give the empty clip on stage an INSTANCE name
4) call instanceName.loadMovie("fox.swf")

then the fox.swf will play inside the placeholder and the place holder will go through its alpha tweens quite happily

fgf