basic essential flash q

[ankor]

hello,
have been visiting many flash sites that work in a very attractive way, meaning:
there is a steady background (never disappearing while browsing the site) and all the contents appearing inside a shape (most usually a rectangle)which is the only thing changing while browsing.
I am sure this is a rather stupid q, but would you please give me a hint or redirect me to a relevant thread (can't figure which keywords i should use for searching)?

Thank you in advance.

[Ask The Geezer]

What your seeing is one of the simplest things to do in flash. The main movie is the GUI. In it is all the background layers, buttons and other content that is not going to change throughout the movie. It also holds an empty movie clip that has an instance name. This is what you load other, smaller [rectangle] movies you've made into.

So you have made another smaller movie that you want to load into that spot in the main GUI. These "external" movies will always load their top left corner to the dot of the empty movie clip in the GUI, so you know where to position it. If the empty clip has an instance name of mtClip, and your little external movie is named movie1.swf, then the code, either on a button to load it or in a frame, would look like this;

on(release){
_root.mtClip.loadMovie("movie1.swf");
}

[ankor]

big thanks iaskwhy , heading to check this out.

[ankor]

the loaded movie (child) includes buttons.
is it possible these buttons to load another movie (grand-child)to the child movie?

(asking because experimented on doing that. when i test the "child" movie, works fine. not working at all when i test the "grand-parent" movie, meaning "grand-child" movie doesnot appear in the "grand-parent" movie).

thank you

[Ask The Geezer]

Yes, in the child, lets say you put another empty clip and name it mtClip1. Since once the child is loaded to the parent, you have to use the full path on a child button, the full pat, starting from root of the parent, then the code will have to look like this;

on(release);
_root.mtClip.mtClip1.loadMovie('granchild.swf");
}

Nesting movies and targetting them works OK down to about the 4th level. After that, it becomes a problem, although, you could use relative targetting, rather than absolute. And remember, when your making and testing child to load grandchild, the path will be wrong, and it won't work until you load them all together into parent.

[ankor]

u r my man.
thanks is not enough.