Animated menus

[k2kshard]

Hi All,
I am trying to replicate something like the menu from this site..
http://meubelenvanaerde.be/

But i am having some trouble figuring out where best to start, it seems I can do it linearly (as in menu item 1 - scroll to item 2 - to item 3 etc) however making it animate from menu item 1 - item 3, or say menu item 2 to 4 (more dynamically) i am struggling with..

any pointers as to the best way to go about this would be great.

Thanks!

[AttackRabbit]

Thats going to be really difficult to do on the timeline , and to have it work flawless and not all buggy.

[k2kshard]

Thats going to be really difficult to do on the timeline , and to have it work flawless and not all buggy.

Yeah thats what I figure - can you suggest a better method to do this?

[AttackRabbit]

well it really depends on your skill level with actionscript and encapsulation. The way i would do it would be to have an xml file , with everything in it. so you would start with your top level items, in that examples case :

home , catalog , info , etc

so your xml would be something like

<xml>
<site>
<nav>
<navItem name="HOME" id="home">
<subItem name = "SOMETHING GERMAN" id="wierdTHing"/>
<subItem name = "SOMETHING ELSE GERMAN" id="wierdTHing2"/>
</navItem>
</nav>
<navItem name="INFO" id="info">
</navItem>
</nav>
</site>

Then in your application , you would load your xml. Upon load complete , you parse your xml, and pass the object containing the nav node data into your nav which i wrote as a seperate class.

so something like :

nav = new Nav( xml.nav );
addChild( nav )

then in your nav , you would have an empty movieclip to hold the items ,
and you would do a check to see if each nav item had subitems assocaited with it , if it does , once the top level nav is finished , you would call a sub routine like : addSubItems( id ) : where id is the numeric value of the node with nav that contains sub items.

then in someother holder you would do the same thing , recursively loop through your data object , at the provided id number , and populate that other movieclip with sub items.

Then onclick , of a subitem , you would dispatch an event

dispatchEvent( new Event( "onNavigate" , true , false ));

which would propagate up to the parent class , or to a sections manager , which would , say something like

sectionManager.updateSection( evt.target.id )

Theres a lot more to it then just that , but thats the o.o.p way of approaching a nav and sub nav and sections.