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Sprites
SWF sprites (movie clips) are a SWF movie contained within a SWF movie. A sprite tag consists of a series of control tags. All the definition tags should be defined in the main body of the file before the sprite is defined. When a sprite is placed on the display list, it starts a new thread of control where the frames of the sprite are processed independently of the current main timeline frame. A sprite is stopped when it is removed from the display list. The objects placed by a sprite are added to the display list as children of the sprite object. The sprite transform is concatenated to the object transforms.
DefineSprite
Defines a sprite. (SWF 3.0). Sprites are a grouped series of tags. They allow you to nest tags. Each sprite has an independent timeline.
Field Type Comment
Header RECORDHEADER Tag ID = 39
Sprite ID UI16 ID of sprite
Frame Count UI16 Total number of frames in sprite
...<mini file structure>... A series of tags
The valid tags within a sprite are as follows:
ShowFrame
PlaceObject
PlaceObject2
RemoveObject
RemoveObject2
DoAction
StartSound
FrameLabel
SoundStreamHead
SoundStreamBlock
End
If you have the Swish 2 Unwrapped Beta 6 or Insane Flash Animator 2.5 or higher you can see how Sprites work without downloading Flash (Since Flash is a much larger download).