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Loading Dynamic Text Part II
In Part I of this two part tutorial, we learned how to setup a
Text Field to receive text from a text file on your server or
hard drive. Now you may be asking, what if I have TONS of text
I want to put in my new text box, how do I scroll it? Well, with
a few buttons, and a few lines of code in each button, you will
be scrolling your text like a duck in water.
Part I
Lets open up the LIV file that we were working on before, this
will save us some setup time. Remember the file name? It was textLoader.liv.
If you don't have it, just download the one we made from the last
tutorial. Now because I was not thinking a head, we have to resize
our composition to make room for our scroll buttons. You can do
this by clicking on Edit -> Composition Settings.
You should be presented with the composition settings and it will
look like it does below.
Now we need to chang ethe Width to give us a little room. 230 should
be more then enough room, so udpate your width and click on ok.
You should now see that your composition is resized, you may need
to resize your window to see the entire composition.
Now, we need to draw some buttons, you can also use the buttons
that I have included in this tutorial. Infact, they will contain
the code needed to scroll your text field! Now how simple is that!
So, when you have completed drawing your up and down arrow buttons,
you need to convert them to Movie Clip Group's. Convert each button
to a Movie Clip Group, and make the scroll up buttons name up
and make the down buttons name down, and give each of them
a down state from your States Palette.
Now, select both buttons, and CUT them. Now double click on the
textMCG to open it up and select the Dynamic Text [var = myText]
Object. Now paste the buttons into the Movie Clip Group.
You will now see three objects in your textMCG. 1. Dynamic Text
[var = myText], 2. down, 3. up.
Part II
Now we are going to add the code needed in each button, to make
your text scroll!!! We could do this several ways, but we are
going to do this in a way that resembers doing it in LM1. I will
explain another way to do this when we have finished the tutorial.
Select your scroll button that says down and select its
down state. In your timeline window, click on the Loop Movie
Clip icon to make our buttons timeline loop in the down state.
Now double click on the down object in your timeline to open it
up. In the very first frame, we are going to add a new script
to the timeline. To do this, click on the Script Icon to add a
new script to frame 00. This will open your script window where
you can copy and paste the following code.
if(_root.textMCG.myText.scroll < _root.textMCG.myText.maxscroll){
_root.textMCG.myText.scroll ++;
}
Now, I know your wondering what this code is saying exactly. It
says, If the myText variable's value is less then the myText variables
maxscroll, scroll one line. Scroll will return the current scroll
position of your text box, maxscroll figures out how many lines
you have in your text box. So if you have 10 lines of text, and
you are at line 1, when the person presses the scroll button,
it will scroll a line of text. and because we have the Loop turned
on, the user wont have to push the down button for every line
of text. They can simply hold the mouse button down and the text
will scroll non stop. Now close the sript editor and click on
the back arrow on the Movie Clip Menu.
Now select the up button, and do exactly as above, but use the
below code for its down state.
if(_root.textMCG.myText.scroll > 1){
_root.textMCG.myText.scroll --;
}
As you can see, this bit of code is much smaller. Remember the
"scroll" returns the current position number for the
text box. So, all we are saying here is; ifmyText's scroll position
is greater then 1 line of text, scroll backwards one. Thats it!!!
Simple save and export your composition after you have positioned
your scroll buttons to where you want them and your ready to go!
Just don't scroll around too much!
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