Question

I’m trying to set a button to invisible in AS3 however when the I leave the frame and come back to it the button is visible again. This is for a jeopardy game I make making for comm tech class.

Here is what I currently have:

a1.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, a1mouseClick); 

function a1mouseClick(mouse:MouseEvent) {
    a1.visible = false;
    gotoAndStop("A1");
    trace("Going to A1");
}

however when it comes back to the frame with the a1 button it is visible again.

Here is my current animation: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/23938245/jeporady.fla

Answer 1

@fsbmain and @prototypical they are right.

While moving through the timeline flash player can recreates sprites, movie clips and text fields, so your buttons appears visible again. To prevent recreation move all controls to separate level without key frames. If key frames are required try to set the same instance name for this button in all keyframes.

I was looking at your project, and offer a quick fix, you need to do the following:

1. Create a new layer on top to manage a few of actions availables for all frames with the following actions:

   import flash.display.DisplayObject;
   
   // Manages the buttons visible state 
   var buttonsStates:Object = {
       "a1":true, "b1":true, "c1":true, "d1":true, "e1":true,
       "a2":true, "b2":true, "c2":true, "d2":true, "e2":true,
       "a3":true, "b3":true, "c3":true, "d3":true, "e3":true,
       "a4":true, "b4":true, "c4":true, "d4":true, "e4":true,
       "a5":true, "b5":true, "c5":true, "d5":true, "e5":true
   };
   
   // Checks the buttons visibility
   function checkVisibility () {   
       for (var buttonName:String in buttonsStates)
       {
           var child:DisplayObject = this.getChildByName(buttonName);
           child.visible = buttonsStates[buttonName];
       }
   }
   
   // Saves the visible satatus to false
   function setVisibilityToFalse(target:*) {
       buttonsStates[target.name] = false;
       target.visible = false;
   }
   

2. Every time you want to check the visibility of the buttons you must call the checkVisibility() function. For example, every time you return to the button list.

3. Finally the event handler for each button must be like this:

   function a1mouseClick(mouse:MouseEvent) {
       setVisibilityToFalse(mouse.currentTarget); // Saves the visible state to false
       gotoAndStop("A1");
       trace("Going to A1");
   }
   

You can download the edited file here http://cl.ly/Lt6X