willem_shepherd_project3

Project 3 Final Project.

media type="file" key="willem_shepherd_proj3final.swf" [|link to the file] [|willem_shepherd_proj3.zip] (contains both .fla and .swf)

For this final project I decided to use less of the logo and more of the company information and rating. I decided to keep the interface very simple to keep the overall focus on the data rather than extra "ornaments" and unneeded flourishes. If I had more time to code it in, I would have added a rating scale directly on the company information tab, and that would send a confirmation message. As well, the links in the movie clips are not working because they do not actually link to real websites, though if this was a real version, they would obviously be functional.

The main 'meat' of the project is within the left and bottom menu's, because they both rely on each others selections to determine what they display when clicked, for example, if you have selected 2 star companies, if you then click environmental, the environmental button asks what star button is pressed and shows only the logos that have 2 stars AND are environmental. This process works in reverse as well, with the category being selected first and the star rating after.

As well, this flash project uses movement that is different than all of my beginner flash usage, using an actual mathematical function to move the movie clips rather than a motion tween and hundreds of frames, this flash movie cuts down on its size by increasing the text coding, and decreasing the graphic coding.

The primary challenges in this project were to learn flash actionscript from the bottom up, after hours and hours of tutorials, I finally managed to learn a little bit of the coding, though I am positive there is an easier way to do everything I did, but through this process I really learned how the coding worked, and what to do with it. I found the most important thing was to always be careful with the exact wording you used with everything, as it had a ripple effect if you even misspelled a single word.

I particularly had challenges with the movie clip movement and once I got them moving, how to stop them again, and I still am having problems with mouse action within movie clips within movie clips, I could only get actions working from the main stage, not within embedded buttons or movies. I also had a lot of trouble with the left and bottom menus working together, 'inventing' a way around it with a very long if else script and using variables that were defined when a button was clicked.

Errors that I could not fix:, when you roll off an expanded company, if you immediately click on the next company, the one you were on stays enlarged, I think it skips the play function that is applying to the movie, because it takes the play 'reset' frame from the new movie clip clicked on. I think that revised coding and more careful naming could fix this. One thing that I wanted to do was to have a collisoin detector, so that the movie clips would not overlap, but instead be at different levels, similar to the text in processing that we did in class, in order to do this I would need to add a lot more code that deals with depth,or opacity, and I could not figure out levels, There was not way to make all the movie clips on the SAME level, rather then on the same frame in front or behind each other. In that respect, I think this project would have almost worked better if I learned a program more code based and less graphic, or had some help with what code to use in this sitation, as most of what I have done is random stuff from a variety of websites.

Try Navigating with the Menus on the left and the bottom to make your choices more exact, as well as clicking on the actual companies.

Throughout this project, the main bulk of work was on the code, rather than the visuals, though I used color, the original was very black, gray, and white, and it was a last minute decision to add color because it looked very bleak, overall, I think this made it look better, but I think that if I had spent more time on the graphics and less on the code, it would look better, but with the sacrifice of function.
 * Process**

Rough sketches of the menu categories.
 * Pictures of steps before the screen**

The following four images are of the more complicated coding of the project. I chose to add this as part of my process because it is what took the longest time in this project. Because I decided not to use keyframes and movement in the actual timeline, I had to figure out motion of movie clips using code, originally I had the code applied to each movie clip, instead of using a function and applying it that way, I found that defining a function saves you in a variety of ways, including mass application and easy editing.
 * Coding**
 * Clip Movement**

Important to the overall GUI, this script codes for the star buttons and similar script codes for the bottom menu. I am pretty sure there is an easier way to do this, but I don't know what it is, so this works until I learn the better way... The start of the script is just a simple code for the rollover of the button, I separated the menus into three layers, the on/off of the button, the up/over of the rollover and the see-through button that you clicked on.
 * Menu Buttons**

The starting code defines the rollover, the code after that defines the variable that the bottom menu uses to decide what to show, because of the if else statement, the menu is able to determine what to show depending on what button is clicked on the other menu.

A large part of the project is the rollover of the movie clips and making the others opaque, and then when you click on the movie clip, it plays the info part of the movie. This was created by the three functions onRollOver, onRelease, and onRollOut. again, defining functions helped immensely with this code because I had to apply it to every movie clip, and at the start, had copied and pasted the functions and the code was enormous.
 * Movie Clip Action**

The following picture is of the application of the previously defined functions, The onReleaseOutside was just an extra precaution because I found sometimes you click on something and then by mistake release your mouse outside the object, this script stops the clip from playing when that happens.