Making a Dial Button - Page 5

Concluding Remarks

You now have a dial that rotates around itself but performs nothing. The dial knob works just like a slider bar. One thing is that the actions in RC and both instances of RB can be easily adapted to work with a slider.

setProperty("/instance", _property, getProperty ("/dot", _rotation)); 

would be a good start to link the dial with another object. In that case, I would recommend that such an action be included in frame 1, 10 and 20 of RC as it will tell Flash of an initial value (in frame 1) for a given property of /instance and subsequently, of its incremented or decremented value. However, such a line should be put before the code already written in RC.

It is to be noted that the value of _rotation ranges from -180 to 180. Therefore in order to increment values in a range that goes from 0 to 100, a conversion needs to be made a least from the mix of negative and positive values to positive values only (including zero):

i = getProperty ("/dot", _rotation); 
if (i<0) { 
	i = i+360; 
} 

You could play with an object such as Sound (in Flash 5)

mySound.setVolume(i*(100/360));

and wow! you are just about to make one of the most obvious thing someone would do with a device that looks like a stereo dial.

Finally and unfortunately, it is not possible to simplify the dial by using the startDrag action as its parameters are relative to a constraint rectangle of a movie clip. Maybe we can hope that polar positions will be implemented in a future version on Flash.