Actionscript 3 Menu Mega course Part 1: The Basics! Project 1: This first part is for totally new users to Actionscript 3 (or Flash in general). Past CartoonSmart students can breeze through this first course if you are already familiar with creating a movieclip-based button and adding event listeners for simple interactions like roll overs, outs, and clicks. Audio & animated rollovers are also taught. Part 2: Dropdowns & Submenus Project 2: Program simple submenus to drop down from your main menu. Project 3: Add some flair by animating the submenu's alpha or other properties as it drops down. Project 4: Add a looping scripted motion tween to create a hovering effect when the submenu is active. Project 5: Create a submenu that follows the mouse when it isn't being rollover, and swap out the mouse cursor with a movieclip when the menu is rolled over. Note-worthy topics: For loops, timers, tween variables and events, hitTestPoints, swapping the cursor. Part 3: Right Click Menus & Spider Web Type Menus Project 6: Change the right click menu options (aka Context Menu). Not sure what we mean? Right click on any Flash page and you'll usually see the default context menu. You can change what appears in there to include custom items with their own actions. The example file shows how to create a different color theme for your site by adding context menu items like "Black Theme", "Red Theme", etc. Project 7: Program a constantly running enter frame event to "float" your menus when the user isn't selecting one of them. Project 8: Connect your floating menus from the last example with dynamically drawn lines at runtime. This can be used to create a spider-web type interface. Project 9: Play sound from mp3's (or other audio types) in your Library. This can be used for rollover sounds, or looping background audio. The example file swaps out two different looping background files based on whether or not you roll over a menu. Note-worthy topics: customizing the Context Menu, playing sound from the library, looping audio, enter frame events, API to create dynamically drawn lines, programming the drop shadow filter Part 4: Component Scroll Menu and XML Menus Project 10: Use Flash's included List Component to create a scrollable menu. With some help from a custom font and Blending properties we can transform the typically bland appearance of Flash's components to a cool dark theme. Project 11: Load your menu into a parent file to share one menu across many Flash pages. This is an essential trick to managing your menu on a big site (the same thing we do here at CartoonSmart.com) Project 12: Use an XML file to populate a menu. You can specify in your XML file whether the menu item should link to a webpage, go to a frame within the Flash movie, load a JPG, PNG or SWF, or do any other event based on your own custom programming. Using XML to manage the menu contents makes it easy to update without ever needing to republish the Flash file. Note-worthy topics: Parsing XML in Flash, Loading external files, List Component events, loading Movieclips from the Library at runtime, Dynamic Text. Part 5: Keyboard Controlled Menu and Wrapping Up with a Final Project Project 13: Program a final menu to use both mouse events and the keyboard to highlight or move the entire menu onstage. Using the UP and DOWN keys will navigate the menu, and the LEFT or RIGHT keys can move the menu to highlight a section based on the current selection. Note-worthy topics: Keyboard listeners, Programming color tinting, Switch statements, Tween Events, sharing functions between mouse and keyboard events, randomizing colors
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