Flash MX 2004 Games : Art to ActionScript

Chapter 12: Using external files
The familiar HTML tags are all there but in addition within the ‘BODY’ tags are ‘OBJECT’ tags
and with those are ‘EMBED’ tags. ‘OBJECT’ is used by Internet Explorer to insert an ActiveX
control. When using Flash with IE, the user sees an ActiveX control, usually found in the ‘System32’
folder of the Windows folder. The strange numbered ‘classid’ is simply the Windows way
of finding the control within Windows registry. If the control cannot be found then the ‘codebase’
option tells IE where to find the installation program for Flash on the Internet; this is a URL address.
The final parameters for the ‘OBJECT’ tag define the width and height in pixels. Following the
‘OBJECT’ tag are several lines beginning with ‘PARAM’. ActiveX technology can be passed in
parameters via the HTML page. A parameter has a name and a value. The ‘movie’ parameter
defines the name of the swf file. This is in URL format so it can reside in a different folder if necessary.
The ‘quality’ parameter controls whether anti-aliasing is used on the display. Some slower
computers struggle to display a high quality image and so the frame rate can drop. It is sometimes
useful to give the player the option of a higher frame rate at the expense of a poorer display or
vice versa. The final parameter in this example is ‘bgcolor’ which takes a value in hexadecimal
notation.
Numbers do not have to use a base of 10. In the familiar place-value decimal notation when a column
reaches 9 and is incremented the next column along has one added and the current column goes to
zero:
100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110
In the binary system that has only two symbols for numbers once a column has the value one and is
incremented the next column along becomes one and the current column becomes zero:
100, 101, 110
Translating the symbols into a value involves summing the values of the columns:
1111 = 1 ∗ 10 3 + 1 ∗ 10 2 + 1 ∗ 10 + 1 in the decimal system (10 3 simply means 10 * 10 * 10)
1111 = 1 ∗ 2 3 + 1 ∗ 2 2 + 1 ∗ 2 + 1 in the binary system or 15 as a decimal value.
Hexadecimal uses 16 symbols; after 9 there are A,B,C,D,E and F. F is equivalent to 15 in decimal
notation. When specifying colours in an HTML document they take the form ‘#RRGGBB’ where
‘RR’, ‘GG’ and ‘BB’ are two hexadecimal values that specify a number between zero and 255 for
red (RR), green (GG) and blue (BB). How is this the case? Take the hexadecimal value ‘00’, this is
simply,
0 ∗ 16 + 0 = 0
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