nesting swfs

[kiwijetpilot]

I have a small problem. I have a small swf (an animated bird), that is nested within another swf (the page header), where it is motion-tweened to move across the page as it flaps it's wings. This swf is itself nested inside the swf that contains the whole site - so basically I have three nested levels of swf. My problem is that the small animated bird doesn't animate. I'm sure I have read somewhere that you can only nest swfs like this to two levels, but I can't find the reference. Can anyone think of a workaround?

[flashpipe1]

You can nest swfs to MANY levels and it shouldn't affect the animation...

When you play the nested clips individually, do they play? Are you using loadMovie to nest them??

[kiwijetpilot]

Hi, thanks for the response. They all work fine individually, it's only when I get three levels that the first one stops working. I'm not using LoadMovie, just importing the swf files and dragging them onto the stage.

I should really learn how to use LoadMovie. I tried to use it once and just couldn't get it to work, no matter what I did... I'm more into the design side of things than the actionscript.

[flashpipe1]

Yeah, loadMovie will help keep your file sizes down and make updates easier.

Still, you should be able to nest clips almost infinitely without affecting the animation...have you got them all set as movieclips and not graphics or buttons?

I'd be glad to look at the file and see what the problem is...you can email it to flashpipe at gmail dot com

[kiwijetpilot]

As far as I can see I have everything set correctly. I have sent you some test files to look at. I didn't send the main fla as it is pretty big... I just put the problem header in another fla. The problem still seems to exist.

Thanks very much for the help!

[flashpipe1]

Ah...I see the problem...when you import a swf file into an fla, it brings it in as a series of keyframes. If there are objects in the keyframes that are movieclips, they will not animate. Also, it makes for large file sizes, difficulty making updates, etc.

Anyway, here's how to fix this...delete the movieclip in the test.fla file...you don't need it...

Then, in your main timeline, paste this actionscript in:

loadMovie("headertest.swf",1); //this tells the main movie to load the headertest movie into layer 1

Be sure the headertest.swf movie is in the same directory as the test.swf...

Hope that helps!!

[kiwijetpilot]

Perfect! Yes, that worked fine, which really makes me wonder why I was having so much trouble getting loadMovie to work last time I tried. Guess I was trying to do it at 3am while under the influence of too much caffeine or something... plus us old guys don't learn so fast any more!

Anyway, thanks very much for the help - problem resolved.

Cheers!