Controlling the Timeline Easily - Page 2

Setting up the elements

Create your animation, make the control buttons and create the control movie clip:

We put all our buttons inside it and in the actions layer we create 7 keyframes with the following scripts:

1. (label: normal) is used for forward movement

with (_root) {
    fram = _root._currentframe+(1*fastmove);
    if (fram>_root._totalframes) {
        fram = 1;
    }
    gotoAndStop (fram);
}

The property _currentframe gives us the (as you guessed) current frame of our main timeline.
In the above code we're giving the variable fram the value of our currentframe+1 (the fastmove variable will be used to multiply the speed as we'll see later). Then we tell the main timeline to move to fram frame. We have first checked if the fram takes a value greater that the number of the total frames and if it is so we give fram the value 1 (to return to our first frame).

2. is used to control the speed of the movie

counter = 0;
while (counter<=speed) {
	stop ();
	counter++;
}
play ();

Here we create a delay using the while action. While the variable counter is less or equal to the variable speed, our mc is stoped. The counter is increased by 1 and when it's greater than speed the mc plays. The speed, like fastmove, will be defined when we'll place our mc to the main timeline.

3. loops the forward movement

gotoAndPlay ("normal");