FP9 frameMasked Issue

[knottyDJ]

I've been using the masked frame attribute for a number of flash projects in the past to show embedded, dynamic text and have just had them stop working when viewing through FP9.

does anyone have any experience with these or any idea if this is still supported by FP9?

//this enables the movieclip to behave as a mask for the text area
frameMasked.setMask(maskedLayer);

[cancerinform]

Flash player 9 supports all previous actionscript until Flash 8 and of course AS3. The important part is the publish setting of a movie.

[knottyDJ]

Thanks, yeah that's what I thought.

It has actually impacted a number of projects I've completed over the last year that are live on the web. All published as FP7. They've been working fine until a recent browser upgrade to FP9. None of the projects have been republished or changed in any way.

[cancerinform]

I know that setMask works.

Can you mention some of the other problems.

I have heard once that some changes have occurred with stopping all sounds for example, which until Flash 9 had been a bug. So some changes are actually repairs of old long-term bugs.

[knottyDJ]

thanks again.
do you have another way of setting up the setMask method?

I don't have any other problems with the project other than the mask.
Which up until viewing with FP9 was not a problem.

I've used this method in a number of past projects and it has worked like a charm.
I view the .exe it works, I view the .swf it works. I view the page as .html with FP8 and it works.

I view the page as .html with FP9 and the mask is visible.
I'm stumped.

[cancerinform]

What are you masking and when? Sometimes the timing can be important.

[knottyDJ]

Cancer -
thanks for your efforts in diggin for the possible problems here.
So after a bit of stewing in frustration about possible player issues...
uhm (kicks self for not trying this earlier), it seems the simple solution was to remove the parameters from the parenthesis so it reads like this:

frameMasked.setMask();

I also ran it like this frameMasked.setMask(frameMasked);
//assuming the parameter was assigned to the specific instance

this also worked, though if the empty parens also works then I'd question wether the instance name in parens actually did anything.

The bottom line is I've republished a test file and previewed it in browsers with both players 8 & 9 and this method works.

Cheers.

[cancerinform]

That is wrong syntax, because there is no mask.

frameMasked.setMask();

And here your movieclip is also the mask.

frameMasked.setMask(frameMasked);

I have never seen that before. There must be some other problem(s) in your script. As I said, I am using FP9 and often using setMask without any problem. What are you masking or doing when you mask.?

[knottyDJ]

well - hot diggity
I'd be stoked to know the correct syntax for doing this.
If you've got a sample - could you share?

essentially what I've done is working.
I am using it to fly titles into the screen at a specific location and don't want to see the text animate anywhere but under the mask.
-------
I created the mask - gave it an instance name of frameMasked.
I place a movieclip underneath the mask that has a dynamic text field inside with a variable name.
The text field is embedded and populated from an external .txt file.
When the playback head reaches the appropriate frame the text area animates in under the mask.
------

as I said in the previous post, the approach I used worked in both FP9 and FP8 browsers but would be stoked to see a proper technique, in order to avoid troubleshooting again later.

[cancerinform]

nameofmc.setMask(nameofmask);