Hello! I'm currently playing with EA for a little episodic game. I really want to have a 'home' image that has elements that load .gifs when buttons are clicked.
My thought was to go with the solution on this page for loading my gifs so they load every time a button is pressed, allowing them to be played multiple times:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5349903#5349903
I would then know the exact duration of each .gif in milliseconds, and tell it to load the static 'home' image once said milleseconds would pass.
So:
click
>hide buttons
>load gif
>play for x seconds
>load jpg 'home' image
>show buttons
(rinse, repeat)
Also, if anyone has other suggestions for how to accomplish playing different animations from a 'home' image with multiple buttons, that would be excellent! My only other solution has been to load in individual images as a sequence in the timeline. While this works and I can easily skip around the timeline, the image exports get to be very large. I really like how compressed .gif animations are, and it doesn't look like EA allows for starting a gif fresh each time it's referenced in the timeline, so I figured loading it every time would be the best solution.
I'm going to be making a lot of these episodes and would like to avoid sprite sheets, as they are super labor-intensive and I will be dealing with tons of frames.
UPDATE:
After more testing, I was loading 3 different gifs and noticed that they all did not load 'fresh' upon each click; it's as if they were still in their own timeline that played on loop, which was called to whenever its corresponding button was clicked. They all need to play from their first frame.
So I'm thinking this method will not work... Is there a way of reloading gifs so that they're guaranteed to always play from the first frame?
Also, I wonder if there's a way of calling another symbol that's not in the main stage, as a way of cheating to always get to the first frame?
I could export jpg sequences of my animations, but there are going to be dozens of files to load and sort out in the timeline, which isn't nearly as effective as gifs.
Any thoughts are much appreciated! I just want to figure out a really quick method of doing this so I can focus on animation, then plug everything in EA.
I do recognize that this would be easier to accomplish in Flash, but I was hoping to go for a lightweight HTML alternative that would be guaranteed cross-browser/mobile/etc.
Thanks, I really am excited to get this project going!