Sound
Sound is an essential
part of a Flash movie. It may not be an essential part of a menu system,
but we’ll include sound in our menu system at this point in the production.
It can easily be removed at a later time. At this point, we’ll use
a couple of Sound Symbols from the Sounds Library included with Flash.
You can access included Libraries by selecting Window/Common Libraries
and then select the appropriate Library, in this case Sounds. I’ve
made a sounds folder and dragged a copy of Lock Break and Switch Small
Plastic into it. We’ll use both sounds as we build the menu system.
For the final production, if sound is included as part of the menu, I’d
definitely produce and use my own sounds, but its not necessary at this
point.
Buttons
A common solution designers
use for creating buttons is to create an empty or blank button, that is,
a button with no content in the Up, Over, or Down columns, but content,
usually a square, in the Hit column. This way, you can scale the button
over other content, such as the menu bar (to make it draggable) and the
arrow beside the word menu, to expand and collapse the menu items. I’ve
created a buttons folder at the root level of the Library. The empty button
Symbol consists of an Instance of static.block in the Hit column. The
symbol is called button.empty.
Of course, we could use Instances of button.empty over our text as well.
However, a design decision was made to have a line appear below each menu
item as well as a subtle highlight to appear when the user rolls the mouse
pointer over each button. As a result, another button needs to be created
called button.highlight. It consists of three Layers, line, highlight,
and Sound. The line Layer consists of a thin black line through the Up,
Over, and Down columns. The highlight Layer consists of an Instance of
static.block, scaled to the match the width of the line and the height
of the text Symbols. In the Over, and Down column, the Instance’s
Alpha is set to a value of 16% to achieve the subtle highlight. In the
Hit column, the Instance is at full Alpha (100%.) The sound Layer consists
of the Sound Lock Break at the Over column:
The Timeline of button.highlight.
