Fading Backgrounds

I preface this with saying this is the first site I'm trying to develop in flash so its been a very extreme learning experience for me.

This is what I got so far
Note: I have no sort of preloading so you may have to wait for a few seconds after clicking a button for the new background to load/change/

What I am aiming for: Whenever someone clicks a different section in the menu on the left, the background fades into a different image.

How I am doing it right now: When someone clicks the button, I use ActionScript to load a seperate movie for each section on a layer above the initial background.

The problem: If you are in, say, the Music section, and click the About section, it unloads the Music background before fading in the About section. I want to have it fade the About section in above the Music section.

How would I go about fixing this, or is my logic completely flawed and should I take a different approach to do this?

You can download my main index .fla file: HERE

I couldn't view the site. (file not found)

I downloaded the file but couldn't use it. What version are you using? If you are using '04, please save it as mx (only) and repost so I may give it a look. I have a general idea of what you are trying to accomplish but wouldn't want to give advice sight unseen.

Odd, I can load the swf just fine.

I am using MX 2004, which is probably why you can't open the fla, I resaved as just an MX .fla and reuploaded for you.

I also embedded the .swf in a html file so hopefully that will help others see it.

http://www.finaljudgement.net/test/index.html

i saw the swf file online fine.

anyway. i think i can see what your problem is. you probably only have one page (or scene, depending on how you're doing it) for each section. you need to make a new page (or scene) for each transition you want.

you're bacially trying to do what i did here in this site (warning: the transitions in this site are long and slow). i had to make a different scene for each move you could make.

my site has 5 sections: main, comics, sketches, news, and contact. this means i had to have all the following scenes...

main to comics
main to sketches
main to news
main to contact
comics to sketches
comics to news
comics to contact
sketches to news
sketches to comics
sketches to contact
news to comics
news to sketches
news to contact
contact to comics
contact to sketches
contact to news

if i only had one "to news" section, then whenever anyone clicked the news button, it would've always jumped back to the main page before doing the transition to the news. even if it was being pressed from the comics section.

i think that's the problem you're having here. i'm sure there's a more concise way of doing this than having all those scenes, but i -like you- am very new with flash, and that's the best way i was able to make it work.

Thanks optard. Yeah, I figured that was another way of doing it, but like you said, it seems like there must be a more concise way of doing things.

To achieve that, you'd have to use 2 container clips, so that you always load the new movie in the top container, then swap the depths on the containers, so that the next movie can again be loaded in the top container, over the previous movie, now on the bottom container.

That's what I figured. Any idea how I would go about doing this in ActionScript? I haven't been able to find reference to switching container clip depths anywhere online.

I don't have the font you used, and there's no preloader on any of this stuff of your's, but are you basically looking for something like this?

http://www27.brinkster.com/oldnewbie/Flash/main2.html

You'll probably have to copy & paste the above in the address bar of a new browser window, as it probably won't work directly.
Remember there's no preloader so if you're on a slow connection, give this time to load. Also remember that these pictures are quite large, so alpha transitions have a tendency to slow down the whole movie...

That's exactly what I'm looking for.

PM me an address where I can mail you the corrected .fla.

E-mail sent!

On the subject of psychotic penguins, how about this to be one?