I have a background MovieClip in a custom button class, which moves the play head to a different frame (via gotoAndStop(“framename”)) depending on which mouse events it receives.
When the mouse up event is received, it sends the play head back to the “release” frame, where the background should shift back to its original location, but instead nothing happens and the background remains where it was. It’s as though Flash is not honoring the background’s position defined by the key frame it enters.
The only workaround is to add a frame script to each frame which manually sets the x and y position to what it should be, but this defeats the purpose of using keyframes for the position.
What is going on?
This appears to have been a bug in the Flash IDE, specifically some kind of corruption in a timeline layer.
The corruption originated in Flash CS4, but persisted when opened and compiled in Flash CS5, which is why I suspect it was some kind of content-generation bug, rather than something specific to either IDE version. The IDE probably gets confused when you construct the timeline out of order or drag things around, rename things, copy things in from other files, etc. I think, specifically… it was the fact that I copied this particular object in from another file. And it wasn’t even a complex object, it was just a MovieClip that contained a rounded rectangle and had a drop shadow applied, seriously.
Steps I took to resolve the issue were to remove any classes associated with the library item, reverting it back to a standard MovieClip. I then completely removed the problematic layer. I then reassigned the class to the library object and exported it for ActionScript. Finally, I rebuilt the layer from the first frame, adding subsequent keyframes as necessary. I reapplied filters, and adjusted the clips location on each frame.
Now, everything is functioning as expected. The clip’s position, filters, etc. are all updated as expected when the playhead moves to any frame. It’s working now as expected, so I wasn’t doing anything wrong or not possible. It simply must have been some kind of incrementally constructed key framing confusion within the data structures of the IDE. Glad it’s working now.