Attention All Flashers

[StarLite]

Good day all,

No it's not what you're thinking so close up the raincoats.   

I was checking out some tutorials over at YouTube and I was wondering if you could make a movie cutscene with Flash without having to use Action Script. Although the guy made it look easy enough and when he put in a script at least it worked. Any input would be appreciated. 

[NigeC]

Yes you can, you can save and avi or whatever as a sequence of images, Flash will then import that sequence, you could better this by saving the main background and then hide it and only export the images of the animation as png with alpha channel, then have the background on the bottom layer and import the sequence into another layer.. doing it this way you make a smaller file and flash isn't redrawing the background every frame
I favour images rather than the AVI as the images aren't compressed, if you use png as the image format you can compress them to 16 bit in flash without any compression nastyness
However things can get very messy when you start adding more sequences, sound can be a problem as it loads better via a script, really you need a scripted loader
AS2 is a lot easier for controlling a animated sequence but I would be better to start off with AS3 and just not bother with the old.
What Shepherd can do with any animation is amazing, it can tell a movie clip what to do and the clip can do likewise, I did a simple button that could could take control of the character, make him talk, pick up and add to inventory, change the background, even start up Shepherd's internal debug system

[ad7venture]

The only thing I've done that way is importing a bunch of consecutive jpegs.   That's what Blender outputs for an animation.  It works great for that.  You just import the first one and it asks you if you want to import all the rest and you say yes and that's about it.  It will run as a movie when you export it, but I've only done that as a Flash movie.  Just scripting simple movies is easy, if it needs any at all.

[Kickaha]

Do you mean StarLite make a movie using Flash, or make a .SWF file?  I'm sure you can do the latter without using Flash or ActionScript.  I'm playing around with CreaToon at the moment.

[StarLite]

Oh, wow, thanks for the input guys, this all seems so complicated especially since I haven't a clue about how Flash works.

I may just do the scenes through the engine, since it's part of the game anyway, that way I won't have to redo it for the engine.

Actually Kickaha, I want to make a non-playable demo movie style without going through Wintermute. So how are you enjoying Creatoon, I considered taking a look at that as well. So much learning and not enough brain cells.

I guess I'll have to take a look around and see what the best options are. Thanks again 

[NigeC]

Flash animation in its basic form is just like an animated gif, it simply loads images from the timeline to give animation.
the big diffrence it can handle multiple layers and quality is a lot better than a gif animation

[StarLite]

Hey Nige, now animated gifs I can relate to. I've been learning quite a bit lately here and there. I tackled Bryce and I think I now got the hang of it. Looking forward to doing an animation tutorials for it. I feel like I'm running around without my head. I'm all over the place trying to learn a whole bunch of things. Mostly trying to get the hang of Wintermute, making graphics, writing etc.

I don't want to slow down though, if I do I'll get old. Although I am enjoying the run around. Thanks for the heads up on Flash, I'll add it to the list of todos