http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas Flash development time-wasters Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:47:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was trying to draw a MovieClip into a BitmapData object and it just wasn't working. I turned on warning messages in FlashTracer and saw that there was a Security Violation. It turns out that a streaming FLV that played at the start of my movie wasn't being removed, and ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=32 Spent ages trying to attach an FLV to a Video object - it just wouldn't play, or would flicker onto the screen. Turned out to be exactly the same problem as for sound - if you try and attach an FLV to a Video object, the associated NetStream and NetConnection objects ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=29 Spent half a day trying to identify the cause of this, in an AS2 project. A stupid recursion problem caused by something similar to the following: function getResult() : Boolean { trace(getResult():" + getResult()); return value; } The Flash player just used to hang on error on problems like this, but now it fails silently (or ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=24 Sketchy details at present, but having keyframes in a mask layer seem to cause any masked movie clips to re-initialise. Solution at the moment is to move all the keyframes into a single layer movieclip and put that in the mask layer.... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=23 Based on Ivan Dembicki's work at http://www.sharedfonts.com/eng/index.html For fonts, you need two SWFs FONTID-lib.swf - a textfield which embeds all glyphs needed, with bold/italic as necessary, inside a movieclip which is exported for runtime sharing. movieclip has script which registers the textformat of the field with a shared "font manager" object FONTID.swf - a practically ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=11 A couple of oddities about skewed dynamic text fields in Flash 8- they won't render with the "Anti-alias for readability" option- they don't appear to render if the bold or italic font option is set http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=10 Spent ages yesterday struggling with Math.floor() giving me unexpected results - Math.floor(1) was coming at as 0, Math.floor(2) was coming out as 1.The problem arose when testing out a routine for getting the minimum number of coins to make up a value. Numbers that were tracing to the output window ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=9 Haven't got a decent workaround for this yet. I'm having problems removing a movieclip and attaching one within a single frame refresh.The old clip is disappearing but the new one isn't being attached. There is still a reference hanging around, and whatever I do to it, it won't disappear. This ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=8 Came across this error message last week when compiling in the Flash IDE"The linkage identifier 'BottomRightBetButtonSymbol' was already assigned to the symbol 'BottomRightBetButtonSymbol', and cannot be assigned"You'd think I had more than one item in the library with the same linkage ID, but it was in fact caused by a ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=7 I got this today when compiling an FLA into which I'd dropped some new assets. After much head scratching, it turns out that the problem was a movieclip which had a filter applied, wrapped in a Button symbol. I got around this by turning the button into a MovieClip symbol ... http://www.puckish.co.uk/gotchas/?p=6