Builder

I finished all of the stop motion just before the weekend.  Got almost nothing done on Easter (darn family you know).
Since then I have been working on improving the "builder" where users can make a scene and print it out.  Yesterday I was able to make it pull in backgrounds from XML so you can flip through different background options (*note to self~go back and fix the xmllist length issue).

I also had a fair amount of trouble controlling the animals.  I made it so you can scale up, scale down, and flip the animals for your scene.  I found there was a a conflict the way I had written it that would skew the animal if you flipped it before scaling.  After trying numerous solutions I finally figured out that I could scale the objects using height and width with multiplication rather than the scaleX and scaleY and there would no longer be a conflict with flipping the object anymore!
Seriously, it took me hours to figure this out.

My hope is that I can make the entire builder dynamic and not have to make a new one for each animal.  I already have the backgrounds worked out.  If I can figure out how to bring the animals in from XML and keep my functions working I will be thrilled.  Then if i can do that I would like to be able to make it so flash knows what animal to load depending on where the user is coming from.  So if they come from the redpanda.swf it will start with a red panda loaded in.  I think i might be able to get flash to do this using local connection or shared objects, but I am not sure.

I know from class that kind of stuff is pretty easy in PHP, but actionscript tends to make life difficult and suck hours out of my life.  We will just have to see how it goes.


But aside from the builder,  sound and text are the next big things.