Flash and PNGs with alpha transparency

[harrythehunter]

Hi everybody!
I'm currently working on a Flash game (my first game, wheee!) and I'm trying to blow up a spaceship. What I'm doing is, I have an explosion that consists of a sequence of translucent PNGs and a Shockwave that's essentially another translucent (alpha transparency) PNG which I then scale up.
Both the explosion and the shockwave work nicely including the alpha transparency. There's one thing however, that really confuses me. When I look at the explosion/shockwave inside the Flash editor, it all looks great and when the shockwave PNG is scaled up, it gets smoothed so you don't see any pixelation. As soon as I click on "Test Movie" however, the shockwave is no longer smoothed and it looks really terrible (huge pixels). Check out the attached file.

Now I tried everything... the quality is set to "High", "Allow Smoothing" is enabled for all the images, etc.

Does anybody have an idea what I might be doing wrong? Or is it simply that Flash doesn't smooth alpha-transparent PNGs?

Thanks in advance!

[strille]

I think Flash can smooth PNGs even if they have transparency. Try setting the quality to "best" (that might make it run a bit slow though). "Best" will smooth images even if they are animated, but you must have the "allow smoothing" option turned on in the image properties of course.

[harrythehunter]

Thanks a bunch!
Now it looks awesome and is slow as hell :P
Guess I'm gonna have to think of something else.