Peachpit, Written by Kris Hadlock
Animation is fundamental to Flash. It’s the reason that Flash gained so much popularity in its early days. ActionScript 1 didn’t have any animation support, but ActionScript 2 brought power to developers who wanted to add animation to dynamic content with theTween object. However, ActionScript 2 had some limitations when creating externally-driven Flash movies through XML. With the introduction of ActionScript 3, animations can be driven by XML structures called Motion XML. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to create animations generated by Motion XML, using the Animator and MotionEvent classes offered in ActionScript 3. The source code for this article can be downloaded here.