Don't call me yet!

If you have set your asset up in such a way that they contain movieclips in different keyframes and you want to go to a particular keyframe and in turn play the movieclip contained within it, you can't just do the following (here we assume there is movieclip called cartoon_mc inside keyframe cartoon):

// go to keyframe "cartoon"
gotoAndStop("cartoon");

// start animating cartoon_mc contained within keyframe "cartoon"
// this won't work because cartoon_mc will only come into existence
// in the next frame loop
cartoon_mc.gotoAndPlay("start");

Instead, you need to delay it by one frame so Flash has a chance to bring the movieclip into existence.  You can do the delay call by using TweenMax's delayedCall.

gotoAndStop("cartoon");
// Delay calling performAnimation method by one frame
TweenMax.delayedCall(1, performAnimation, null, true);

function performAnimation()
{
  cartoon_mc.gotoAndPlay("start");
}

Minor fix to Gaia Flash Framework

We recently started using Gaia Flash Framework on a microsite project.  In case you don't know what Gaia is, it's a very well-written navigation framework for Flash microsites, though not so much for games since game's interaction flow is usually highly customized.

The nice thing with Gaia is it doesn't take much to get up to speed and running with it.  While playing around with the Gaia demo code, there was one minor hiccup I ran into:

If you compile the individual page fla that makes any Gaia API calls (such as Gaia.api.getPage), you will get a runtime error.  This makes sense since Gaia API is not available at this point, but it's nevertheless annoying because in the course of developing a site using Gaia, you will be compiling individual pages a lot.  Getting these errors when testing the page individually can be a bit of a distraction.

The solution to this problem turned out to be quite straightforward.  A quick browse at the framework code shows that Gaia API uses GaiaImpl and GaiaImpl is instantiated in GaiaMain class (via the ungodly name GaiaImpl.birth()).  Since GaiaImpl is being used as a singleton and it has no dependencies with any other classes, there is really no need for it to be instantiated inside GaiaMain.  So I commented out the GaiaImpl.birth call in GaiaMain and instantiated GaiaImpl via static initializer instead.  With this single change, the page will now compile properly by itself even though it doesn't go through GaiaMain.

public class GaiaImpl implements IGaia
{
  private static var _instance:GaiaImpl;

  // static initializer

   {

      birth();   

  }
  ...

}