Controlling Different Timelines

Written By: Evgueni Strok
Difficulty Level: Beginning
Requirements: Flash 5 Download FLA



One question we see on the forums very often is: "I have a Movie Clip and I want to control it from the main TimeLine, or another movieclip. How can I do it?" The solution is to use the appropriate Path (see the tutorial) to the movieclip. This tutorial provides a step by step example.

Create an MC and 3 buttons and put all of them on main TimeLine

Button1 -- "frame 25"
Button2 -- "label Hi"
Button3 -- "play"

MC -- "MC main" -- (instance name=MCtest)

Take a look inside MC main:



And remember to add instance name (MCtest) to MC



How it works

Using 3 different buttons we'll tell MC to go to different frames of MC TimeLine by number of frame , label of frame and play MC after MC has been stopped.

Button1 -- "frame 25"

Button2 -- "label Hi"

Button3 -- "play"

The main Timeline always has the name _root. Target paths are hierarchical addresses of movie clip instance names (MCtest --- in our case), variables, and objects in a movie. You can name a movie clip instance in the Instance panel.