I have seen this issue pop up several times recently, so I decided to dedicate a post to it.
Here’s the situation: you have a complex hierarchy consisting of a number of animated MovieClips, nested into one another at various levels. You’d like to be able to start and stop the animation of the whole hierarchy (think of a “pause” functionality in a game for example), but the standard stop / play methods of the MovieClip class just aren’t going to cut it, as they only apply to the top-level timeline.
Now what?
Well, I made a little class called AnimationControl, which recursively crawls the entire hierarchy, and stops / plays every element within.
Playing around with the demonstration SWF below will make this whole concept a lot clearer than extra paragraphs of text could, so go ahead and click away:
…and now for the code.
Just import the AnimationControl class, and call the static methods using something like AnimationControl.playAll(yourobjectname);.
It’s pretty robust – at least it certainly won’t freak out if you try to use it on weird object-types with no timeline.
Also, since the function-names to call (stop and play by default) can be explicitly specified, adding more elaborate functionality (like gotoAndStop ("yourlabelname");) should be a fairly trivial change.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 | // (C) edvardtoth.com package { import flash.display.DisplayObjectContainer; import flash.display.MovieClip; public class AnimationControl { public function AnimationControl() { } public static function stopAll (item:*):void { if (item is DisplayObjectContainer) { controlAnimation (item, "stop"); } } public static function playAll (item:*):void { if (item is DisplayObjectContainer) { controlAnimation (item, "play"); } } private static function controlAnimation (item:DisplayObjectContainer, funct:String):void { var clip:MovieClip; var child:DisplayObjectContainer; if (item is MovieClip) { clip = item as MovieClip; clip[funct](); } if (clip.numChildren > 0) { for (var i:int=0, n:int = clip.numChildren; i < n; ++i) { if (clip.getChildAt(i) is DisplayObjectContainer) { child = clip.getChildAt(i) as DisplayObjectContainer; if (child.numChildren != 0) { controlAnimation (child, funct) } else if (child is MovieClip) { clip = child as MovieClip; if (clip.totalFrames > 1) { clip[funct](); } } } } } } } } |
thanks for sharing)