Continuously Looping Background

Written by: Roy Haryanto
Difficulty Level: begining
Requirements: Flash 4

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Part 1



Have you ever wanted to create a continuously looping background so that it seems the foreground object is in perpetual motion?

This tutorial will explain clearly how easy it is to achieve that. After reading this tutorial some expert users of Flash will comment that we can save trouble by using actionscript. Well I did not say we can't but this tutorial is meant for beginners, targetting those who only realised the existence of Macromedia Flash a few days ago.

So without further ado, let us start the tutorial.

The first step is to add 30 frames to the layer. This can be done by clicking on the first frame of the layer and press F5 until there are 30 frames.

The next step is to import the graphic object which is going to be used as the background.

File > import
Select the backgound image (in this case sky.jpg)
Then click Open.

By now you should have picture of a sky in the centre.



Duplicate the Image
We need to duplicate the picture so that it fills up the screen.

Click on Ctrl+C to copy the image into clipboard and Ctrl+V (3 times) to add 3 more pictures of the sky. If you only see 1 copy of the image it likely that the 4 images are on top of each other. Drag one image to each of the 4 corners and try to align them so that the overall image looks continuous.



We have to duplicate this combined image and align the copy beside the original.
Edit > Select All, Ctrl+C to copy the combined image and Ctrl+V to paste it onto the screen.
Again, the images should be aligned next to each other to form a long continuous rectangular image.