and was hoping someone knew of a way to create that effect in flash or maybe new of a place to download that kind of navigator. I would like to use it for a map on some pages I do.
(I am of course talking about their scrollable Tournament Chart)
Thanks in advance
CyberScout
Have a look around www.flashkit.com and www.ultrashock.com
It's a question of tracking one dragable movie clip and binding its co-ordinates to another. That one's quite simple actually. You need to get to know your way around flash and Actionscript.
I've not used Flash MX or even 5 for about a year but for a draggable object (in F5) you needed to create a button symbol with the StartDrag() stuff in and put it inside a movie symbol which will be dragged.
Not very hard but you need to get to know your symbol capabilities (ie the button can't be dragged, only the movie clip around the buton. The movie on the other hand can't interact with the mouse and so can't be selected for dragging). And learn about instance names too.
** It's possible non of this can be applied to Flash MX, a program I've no experience of and which is substantially different from F5.
It can be applied in MX. For the most part actionscript in MX is backwards compatible. Well except for the unsupported commands like the save file command for saving text files. Those were only in the app for dev reasons.
hi,
in effect, this navigation is basically a "loose" scrollbar.. i.e. it works in the same way as a scrollbar but the object being scrolled isnt constrained on the x axis.
As I see it, there are two ways of doing this.. The first, the sloppy way is to drag your scroller clip (several ways to do this in flash), and constrain to the particular area. startDrag() as mouse says is the best way of dragging, you can set the boundaries of the drag as parameters. Now, the only potentially tricky part to this is obtaining the ratio with which to scroll the other clip. i.e. 2ndclip._x=-1stclip._x*ratio; indicating how much to scroll the second clip relative to the first (e.g. 2:1 pixels). You need this ratio to make sure the second clip doesnt scroll too much or too little. Why i said "sloppy method" as the first is that you can use trial and error the obtain the ratio, or you can calculate it based on the sizes of 1)draggable clip, 2)visible scroll area, 3)size of second clip (the "proper way"). Off the top of my head, this equation is something like:
posn of content clip = currentdragclipposn*-((underclipsize-visiblescrollarea)/(visiblescrollarea-dragclipsize));
where underclipsize is the size of your content clip, currentdragclipposn is the position of your draggable clip visible scrollarea is the scroll area size, and drag clipsize is the size of the scroller clip. Note you would need to do this in both x and y coordinates of course.
like i say this may be slightly wrong, but u get the idea.
so, you can either spend time messing about with this stuff (if you do get this figured out you will have obtained a pretty decent knowledge of flash), or as ionsurge suggests, visit www.flashkit.com, somebody will have done this before..