8. Controlling the Timeline

Developers making the leap from timeline-driven applications to ActionScript-driven applications will use a combination of frame-based functionality with ActionScript control. In some cases, it just makes sense to create visual states of a display object on separate frames and toggle between the visual states using ActionScript. In many cases, pure ActionScript is overkill. Some experienced coders snub their noses at timeline-based functionality, but there’s nothing wrong with using the timeline. Just keep it short and simple.

This chapter introduces you to controlling the timeline using ActionScript. We discuss starting and stopping animations and targeting specific frames on the timeline using MovieClip class methods. We also cover traversing the hierarchy of display objects to target different timelines using absolute and relative target paths, and changing a movie’s frame rate using the frameRate property of the Stage class, which is new to ActionScript 3.