Home / Computers / Software

Adding Behaviors to Buttons (Continued)

Below, our Stage shows the car with its motion guide layer—the path it will follow as it moves around the Stage. We’ve added a new layer for our buttons, and dropped the buttons on frame 1 of that layer (called “Buttons”):

We’ve also added an Actions layer to hold our ActionScript code. We did this earlier, when we added a stop() action to the end of the movie.

If you like, select the last frame of the Actions layer and open the Actions panel, just to verify that the stop() action is there:

Before we program our buttons we need to add a stop() action to the beginning of the movie, to prevent the Timeline from automatically moving forward as soon as the movie loads. We’ll do this now, and then we’ll add play and stop actions to our buttons to allow the user to control the progression:

1. Select the first frame of the Actions layer.

2. Open the Actions panel. Click the Global Functions folder to expand it, and then click the Timeline Control folder to see a list of actions. Double-click the stop action to add it to the Script pane:

Now the movie will wait for an event before playing the animation.

3. On the Stage, select the play button.

4. If it isn’t still open, open the Actions panel. Verify that you’re in the Script pane for the play button.

5. You can either use the folder list to navigate to available actions, or you can add an action using the plus  button at the top of the Script pane.