Creating Buttons with ActionScript 3.0

07 Dec 2009 No Comments

by eviltwinin code, flash, tutorial Tags: , , ,

This is a quick guide on how to create and set up a button in AS3.

Set up the movie clip as a button

To make sure that your movie clip will act like a button you need to set the buttonMode and also set the movie clip to have a hand cursor.

bttn.buttonMode = true;
bttn.useHandCursor = true;

Ensure that you won’t interact with the child movie clips

When you rollover a movie clip in AS3, then the mouse cursor will recognise child clips within your button movie clip. To ensure that this doesn’t happen you can set the mouseChildren to false.

bttn.mouseChildren = false;

Making the button do stuff

Create a event listeners to call a function when the you interact with the movie clip.

bttn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, doStuff);
bttn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, overBttn);
bttn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT, outBttn);

Using mouse events

Here is a sample of how you use the mouse events. This function will trace the movie clip that you have clicked on.
function doStuff (evt : MouseEvent) : void
{
trace(evt.target)
}