Creating HTML5 Animations with Flash and Wallaby

Chapter 3. Creating Advanced Animations

When building animations it’s important that you don’t introduce things into your animations that don’t export. The last thing you want to do is to spend several hours tweaking an animation that previews in Flash, only to discover that Wallaby doesn’t support some aspect of it.

As I mentioned before, Wallaby can’t possibly support all of the many features of Flash. Here is a list of what it does support, along with some usage tips:

Timeline

Wallaby supports the Flash Timeline, keyframes, and tweens. Support for nested timelines (movie clips) does exist, although it’s suggested that animations should be designed primarily on Flash’s main Timeline where possible.

Layers

Standard layers, guide layers, and mask layers are supported within animations.

Wallaby only supports masks with a duration that lasts the duration of the frame. If you make a partial mask on a layer, it will generate an error. Masks, when converted, can also put significant strain on less powerful devices. As such, be careful when using complicated masking, and be sure to keep the number of masks in your animation at a minimum.

ActionScript

Wallaby provides no support for any ActionScript, with one exception: the stop() command. Putting stop() on the final frame of an animation allows you to specify that the animation should not loop. Otherwise, all animations will loop by default.

Symbols

Symbols and symbol identifiers are supported in Wallaby. In fact, symbol identifiers are carried ...