Difference between movieclip and sprite

[Pandemonium_m]

I am new to koolmoves.
what is the difference between a movieclip and a sprite?

when i load a movie within a movie by the load command is this not a movieclip since it is running in its own timeline independent of the main movietime line.
i am confused.

please help.

[johnie]

There is no difference between a Movie Clip and a sprite. The main difference is where it is being referenced. Flash calls it a Movie Clip where as the SDKs and other documentation refers to them as Sprites, as do other SWF tools. I think Bob prefers the term movie clip rather than sprites. Kool Moves does not implement Sprites yet it has a different method of inserting Movies into a current project.


The Insert Movie action lets you load a Movie over the current timeline. In effect combining 2 KoolMoves Movies. KoolMoves is the only tool on the market that allows you to do this.

[johnie]

Load movie is something completly different than either of the two that I mentioned. when you use Load Movie the loaded movie sorta runs in its own timeline. You have very limited control over where it gets loaded and you cannot apply atributes to it. TellTarget (SetTarget) also cannot be used on a loaded movie but can on a sprite. Since KoolMoves does not implement sprites there is no TellTarget(SetTarget) Action.

[Pandemonium_m]

thanx.you clreared up a few confusions.i do have control where the movie is loaded or i should say in which keyframe?
isn't movieclip defined as a movie that runs within a movie in its own timeline idependent of the main movie.this is my whole confusion.

[johnie]

When you use load movie the loaded movie does not interact with the movie on the lower levels (other than to load or unload them). Movie clips can interact and be interacted with TellTarget. Also a movie clip counts against the 16,000 limit on the flashplayer- Load movie doesn't.

[Bob Hartzell]

You can educate me too. It is my understanding that a sprite is a movie involving only a single symbol not a movie of many symbols. Is that correct?

[johnie]

Basically its a child Timeline that runs until it is removed. TellTarget points to the object (Movie clip) and then you can select frames from it.

This is the documentation on sprites...

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).

[johnie]

Once the sprite is created instances of it can be put anywhere- That is why you probably think it is a movie made of 1 symbol. Once created the sprite can be placed just like a single symbol.

They claim that tell target can transfer info between loaded movies but I haven't seen it done before. If Tell Target can do this then that would be a good action to add.