Building a Custom Cursor in Flash 5 - Page 3

Creating the Cursor

Step 1 : Create the Cursor

First - design your cursor. I based mine off a compass, the image shamelessly stolen from PointBinc.com. For now lets work with this image though you can create your own if you want to.

Whatever you design, make sure there is a centerpoint and that it isn't so big that it becomes an annoying blob on your screen. (I've seen plenty of these.)

My final cursor (in the next tutorial) blinks, turns and changes size as you move it. This may be too much of a distraction, but for an example of what can be done, it's quite cool. I've made it bigger in the example above.

Step 1.1 (optional) : Building the Blinker Pointer

When you open the source code you will notice that the cursor MC "maincursor" is actually a movie clip which has movie clips inside it. The structure looks a little like this:

The MC "blinker mc" and the graphic "blinker" form an optional animation. If you only require a static image as a cursor, jump straight to Step 1.3 : Putting the Cursor Together

To create a pointer simply use the drawing tools to draw a triangular pointer and fill it with your color of choice (I used #C8C4C8). Next select the pointer that you have made and choose Insert > Convert to Symbol. Name it "blinker" and select the graphic option.

The Blinker