Daisy chain movies together in Flash AS3

Question

This is a 2 part question, I apologize. I know other developers must have workarounds for the 16,000 frame limit.

How do I daisy chain movies together in Flash AS3?

A. What is the best way to daisy chain movies together in Flash AS3.
B. Can I treat it as an extended timeline beyond 16,000 frames

Not by conventional thinking

"Flashes 16,000 frame limit"
"There's no way to define frame space of unloaded frames"

It'd be cool

"It would be cool to kind of join all the clips together in a progressive load"
"It would be cool to control the cue points of an extended clip"
"It would be so cool to control the speed-beginning-end"*

I have to make a counter that goes up to a million and uses animations. Long story short, "I'm running out of frames and have a bunch of smaller movieClips to piece together."

Verbose Example

Load N play==>Complete Movie==>Add N remove Childrens==>Load next movie!!!

Frame Based Issues "fl.flash.display.stage"

• have to use graphics, not dynamic text
  
• want to control frame rate or speed of animations
  

Time Based Issues "fl.flash.utils.Timer"

• options were not scalable by frame rate
  
• other issues caused me to discard time based methods
  
• inherent problem of trying to code with tweening engines "Greensocks Tweenmax"
  

*I keep asking, I apologize:)

#CRITERIA FOR COUNTER ANIMATION

#1000.00 “frame or time based”

 “decimal”
 x 10 value 
 x 100 value 

 “whole”
 x 10,000 value 
 x 1,000,000 value 
 x 10,000,000 value 

#TWEEN 
 tweens all have to be the same value, so the 
 numbers transition together 
 “all 20 frames etc” 
#WHOLE
 whole numbers all move at different rates 
 “numbers roll-in together”
 whole numbers all have the same number of frames for tweens  

#DECIMAL
 “x 100 jump” 
 decimal numbers scroll really fast because they 
 are a lesser value than the whole numbers 

Answer 1

So, let me get this straight.

You are displaying a counter that goes from 1 --> 1,000,000 and you are intending on using 1,000,000 frames to do it?

Are your animations specific to the count sequence? Like 8 morphs into 9, then 9 morphs into 10, with shape tweens?

Answer 2

I know other developers must have workarounds for the 16,000 frame limit

For one, developers hardly ever even use frames. It sounds like the kind of thing you are talking about must be able to be done a lot easier with code.

It sounds to me like you could just make one movieclip that contains the animation of one loop. So an intro, and an outro. It would also have a dynamic textfield. With AS3 you would set the textfields text property to a number, play the animation. When it gets to the end of the outro, rewind it, and change the textfield to the next number. As long as the Outro animation loops seamlessly with the next intro animation, it will look fine.

Elaborate a bit, and answer comments, and I will try to help a bit more.

Answer 3

Export each animation sequence as its own SWF, then make one main Flash project to handle the entire movie. Create a Document class for this main project. That Document class has a Loader member that will load the SWFs. In the Document class, create an Event.ENTER_FRAME listener to monitor the frames of the loaded SWF.

Create an array (swf_array) that contains each of animation's SWFs in the order they should be loaded. Create an integer (swf_counter) to keep track of the current position in the array so you know which SWF needs to be loaded next. Set it to 0 at first.

Using Loader, load the first SWF (swf_array[0]) into the document and add it to the stage when it has finished loading and make it start playing if it doesn't play automatically. The enter frame listener checkd the current frame of the loaded SWF and compares it to the total number of frames of the same loaded SWF. When currentFrame matches totalFrames, the SWF is done playing and you need to load the next SWF. Increment swf_counter by one, then use the Loader to load the next SWF. Repeat.

Possible enhancement: use a second Loader to load the SWF that is next in line so it will be ready to play before the current SWF has completed.

Using separate SWFs will eliminate the max frames problem since all of the animation frames are not in a single document. Also, with this method you can easily add or remove animation sequences without having to touch the main timeline.