Creating Mouse Trails - Page 6

The Foundation (cont.)

As mentioned, we plan to place each letter and number in the message inside a matching movie clip. To create these movie clips, we need a single movie clip. Thus, we attach itemMaster to the root of our file. This is done using the following expression (it only works if the name itemMaster is stated under Symbol Linkage Properties for itemMaster), where we make sure that the depth is unique to avoid conflicts:

_root.attachMovie( "itemMaster", "itemMaster", 10000 ); 

Finally, we need a loop, which creates the movie clips and assigns the necessary variables to each movie clip:

for (i; i<%lt%>=myLength; i++) { 
    duplicateMovieClip ("itemMaster", "trail"+i, i); 
    myTrails[i] = _root["trail"+i]; 
    myTrails[i]._x = startX+i*letterSpace; 
    myTrails[i]._y = startY; 
    myTrails[i].myChar = myText.charAt(i-1); 
    myTrails[i].xPos = myTrails[i]._x; 
    myTrails[i].yPos = myTrails[i]._y; 
} 

According to the above, we use the variable i as a counter for the loop which ends, when i isn't smaller or equal to the length of our message. This length is equal to the number of movie clips, we want to create. The first thing we do is to duplicate itemMaster. Each duplicate is given the name "trail” + i so that the first is named trail1, the second trail2 etc., where the depth is i:

duplicateMovieClip ("itemMaster", "trail"+i, i);