Lassie within a Flash Site
Hi all, I'm thinking of redesigning the somethingamiss site entirely in flash and I wanted to check with some more knowledgable (ie you all) people before undertaking the effort. Would it be possible to run the LASSIE player swf WITHIN another flash movie? Or would that mess up all the saved files and cause general chaos? The only reason I'm considering this is because I've noticed that a lot of other sites will link to a somethingamiss chapter swf directly and host it on their site via php. I don't mind the exposure but it limits people from seeing other pages on my site. So, I was thinking if it was all self contained in one flash file, if someone hijacked it, they'd have to hijack the entire site. What are your thoughts on this? Is it possible? Any drawbacks that you can see?

One major drawback: The Lassie Player must be running as _root (ie: the base-level movie). If you load the Lassie player into another movie, then it will be running as a sub-level movie. Ummm... then again I know that there is a "lockRoot" command in Flash. Dunno what it does, but this MIGHT be an attribute that can be set to tell a nested movie to behave as root to all its children. If that is the case, this might be possible. I'll have to look into how that setting works. In the meantime, I need to go to bed. More later... be sure to post a reminder followup to this thread to prompt me for more information when I'm fully awake.

more information when you're awake ;-)

Gracias
Thanks Greg, Don't want to tax your brain too much. If its uber-complicated I'll probably just stick to an HTML site. CSS & PHP are kicking my butt as is.

Got an answer for you... this IS possible! Sweet! So, what you'd need to do is this: 1) Create an empty movieclip and place it on stage. Give it an instance name of... o, say "lassieas_mc". 2) Open the actions panel and write the following AS onto another layer in the frame that the "lassieas_mc" movie is present: lassieas_mc.onLoad = function() { this._lockroot = true; } lassieas_mc.loadMovie("lassieasplayermovie.swf"); Easy! The empty movieclip will get the LassieAS player application loaded into it, then upon finishing loading it will set its _lockroot property to keep all "_root" references within the AS player pointing at the player timeline (rather than the actual root timeline)

Really good idea Tucker! Especially for game episodes etc. Another amazing possibility of LassieAS, Greg!

Cool
Wow, What a versatile program flash is...thanks for looking into that Greg.

Problem
Hmmmm....I think I'm missing something. I followed the directions and got the following error message upon publishing.... **Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=Layer 1, frame=1:Line 1: Statement must appear within on/onClipEvent handler lassieas_mc.onLoad = function() { **Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=Layer 1, frame=1:Line 4: Statement must appear within on/onClipEvent handler lassieas_mc.loadMovie("experiment.swf"); Total ActionScript Errors: 2 Reported Errors: 2 Any thoughts?

On first glance, I would say that error is caused by adding the action to a frame instead of a movieclip. But you probably already knew that.

Yup...tried that.
Yup, I thought of that too. It's definitely applied to the movieclip. My actionscript skills are too pitiful to MacGyver it. So, I think I'll give up on this for the time being...

No, you can't apply that to a movie clip. If you want a Greg rule 'o thumb, NEVER apply script directly onto objects. Always place it as script on a blank keyframe on a timeline. So, that script above would be applied to a blank keyframe on the same timeline that the container clip sits on.

I'm guessing you mean a time-line frame inside a movie clip. that makes sense.

Only just noticed this thread... did you ever since try to embed your game.swf in your Website shell swf, adventureman? I've been trying to do this with the abovementioned method suggested by Greg, only to find that the position of the Rollover spots of the verb disc get shifted due to the nesting and thus make the verb disc unusable. So, I'm curious if you managed in the meantime. :D

Workaround
Hi Fleur, I actually wimped out and did a workaround. I used the menu.swf as my website and placed all the nested movie clips into it. Would love to figure out how to really embed the game.swf into a website.swf one day, but I didn't have the time to tinker.

Ah okay...I figured as much when playing 'Something Amiss' :) I thought it was very well done though! Wish I had thought of that! I'll let you know what comes of my continued (as of yet fruitless) tinkering...