flash

[NMS]

I am thinking of learning Macromedia flash....coz people are getting more towards it everyday. Do you have any particular suggestions? or tutorials?

[Pig]

The tutorials that come with it are pretty good. I started out with Swish, so it was hard for me to unlearn some of the ways they do things. flashkit.com has lots of open source files so you can examine how people do things. There is a high learning curve, but once you get the idea of how things work, it is all very easy.

[get.Mos]

http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/

[sfrancism]

VISUAL QUICKSTART GUIDE book, thats all i can say.

[NMS]

I have downloaded the trial version and started the tuturials...I will see how it goes but it seems simple till now. ;)

[satis]

it is pretty simply...until you start with actionscripting. Or try to make something with a hundred layers across 1000 frames. :)

[Croc Hunter]

www.flashkit.com is alright just so many adds is annoying. So my favorite flash site with good tutorials and heaps of cool stuff to play with http://virtual-fx.net/vfx/index.php gets my vote Nev.

[freddythunder]

I know this is like a month late, but, I just started with this forum and I do a lot of flash..Like I told someone else on the first (of six) posts here, I learned tons of Flash (starting) with these four sites:
http://www.kirupa.com
http://www.kirupaforum.com
http://www.bit-101.com
http://www.actionscript.org

I'm totally addicted to flash objects now. I'm now trying to learn PHP and everytime I get something to work in PHP, I make it work in Flash so I can add animation..It's the best (right now, anyway...)

[discipulus]

here are some more links that you might want to check out someday

http://www.were-here.com/forum
http://www.ultrashock.com

[twist]

Websites are great but I am thankful that I hunkered down at first and used a book. I used Sam's learn flash in 30 days or something like that by Sam's. Anyway, it went painfully slow as the author made you go through every single basic step over and over agian and only covered basics, and only very basic actionscripting. I must say though I am really glad I did though. You would be surprised at all the little things people miss when they use flash. IMO it just does too many things to be able to learn it reading random tutorials.

I also had some other flash book, which was a joke, the author just listed how to do things you can get online for free. How to add a volume control and crap like that.

I have read some bad books by Sam's (ASP.NET for starters) so I am not promoting them or anything, but this particular flash book I would recommend to any beginners.

p.s.
It was a flash 5 book, don't know if they make a good flash 6 book or not. BTW, i hated and avoided flash 6 like the plague at first, but now I can't get enough of it.

[freddythunder]

I started with a 'Visual Quickstart' book of Flash MX (6). It was like what Twist said, it was very basic, but you have to crawl before you walk..

I actually, think that you can learn more from tutorials than books that I've seen. Then again, I haven't needed to buy a book since I went to some of the all-Flash forums like kirupaforum.com - They have a bunch of tutorials and links to hundreds more. Mostly in flash, some in serverside scripting and design. I learned most of my beginning actionScripting from that link I put about BIT-101.com.

It's good stuff.

[twist]

Yeah, I learned actionscripting from online tutorials. Also server-side connectivity and so on. The cool thing about using the book to learn all the basics was that when I read the online tutorials I only had to figure out the advanced stuff so I didn't have to read dumb-downed tutorials.

I even figured out how to make a flash login box. I couldn't find any tutorials anywhere on how to do this even though it is surprisingly simple.

[freddythunder]

Hey twist, I'm working on just that right now, are you by chance using PHP and MySQL for that login box in flash? I actually have one that uses that, it works, but there's some bug in it that I can't find. Basically, I have Flash send off the vars to a PHP that checks for a match at MySQL, if it find one, it returns a one, otherwize, nothing. I put in a text box to see if flash is receiving the var back and it is, but it's not gotoAndPlaying where it's supposed to.

And as for tutorials, I sometimes like them dumbed-down (I'm kinda dumb....) But, I agree with the book thing. Both books and tuts on the internet help me. And you definately can find more in depth stuff in books than the internet.

[twist]

If you happen to go the site I posted under the other topic, please don't think the login box isn't funtional. The website is a work in progress, and I was dealing with other issues. The login box does work and has been tested, but I am redoing the login script for other things. Anyway, other priorities mean I can't work on the website for quite sometime, the only reason I am here today chatting is because my other website is down becuase of these ftp01 problems. As soon as it goes back up you probably won't see me here again for some time. sorry :(

Here is the actionscript for the login button

The first frame of the movie


userpass.password = true;


The instance name of the password inputfield is called 'userpass'

The name inputfield is called 'username'

The password inputfield is called 'enpassword'

The login button
(user is a variable passed to the flash movie, it's the session id, style is also a variable passed to the flash movie, it is only there in case the user has cookies disabled)


on (release, keyPress "<Enter>") {
if (user == ".php") {
} else {
user = user+"&style="+style;
}
var homepage = "homepage"+user;
var loginpage = "login"+user;
var redirect = homepage;
var username = username;
var password = enpassword;
var login = "log in";
if (remember == true) {
var autologin = autologin;
}
getURL(loginpage, "_self", "POST");
}


All this is passed to login.php and it simply does a check against the username and password. The homepage variable is just the address of the homepage, that way it can redirect the user to the homepage if login works. If login fails it redirects to the login page, thus the loginpage variable. The autologin is for MySql to check whether to auto-login the user.

Hope all the extra stuff doesn't confuse you.

Good luck

[freddythunder]

No, it doesn't confuse me and thank you for responding. I never went to the site, so I'll have to go check that out. Could you post your PHP script as well for me? I want to see your method of checking MySQL. Thanks!

After reading through that code again, you have the login.php do the redirecting to another page if the vars from Flash come back correctly. That could work for me. I'm actually trying to have flash read the variable (match or no match) and then have the flash movie gotoAndPlay the frames with the secret stuff on it. I know that you have to put Flash into a loop and have it jump out of the loop when the varaible reaches Flash, all that works, but Flash doesn't want to globaly recognize the incomming variable. Any ideas on that?

[twist]

I think I get it now, you want to access your database to check username and password and then continue with the flash movie if everything checks out, but you don't wont to reload the page.

Ahhh, much more tricky.

So you want to send new variables to flash without reloading the page?

Wouldn't it be easier to have the user login somewhere else then send a variable to flash saying whether the user is logged in or not?

This is way over my head, if you haven't been here yet, these guys can probably answer the question

Try here (http://www.flash-db.com/)

Good luck with that, tell me if you figure it out

[freddythunder]

Thanks Twist! I'm posting right now on the flash-db. I never knew about that site, and their login page is exactly what I am trying to make, so someone should be able to figure it out.. I will let you know what happens. Thanks again for your help!!