Anyone good with Flash?

[Dizzydude]

Alright I'm getting desperate here, it's 2 am and I'm trying to finish this stupid project for English. Here I thought it would be fun since I have fun making animations and things. But it all turned to crap and i've been working on it solid since 6pm and a buddy was helping me out but went to bed without figuring out how to do this.

I'm making a jeopardy game in flash so I have the board and my problem is when I click a question (lets say $200) the question slide fades in yet all of the other ($200, 400, etc.) are over top of the question slide so you can't read it properly. I've been googling forever and can't seem how to make them disappear AND reappear once the question slide has been read and i click it back to the main board.

Any help would be soooo very much appreciated as i'm getting super tired. I'll send the .fla if anyone wants to take a look!

thanks.

[Corpasp]

Add me on MSN, i can help you out... But i'm English mind.. so dunno how the timing will work for ya ;)

[H2O TankBusta]

I might be able to help you too, add me on MSN and I can take a look at it too.

[Dizzydude]

Thanks a bunch Corpasp, you saved my presentation lol. Everything went really well and it looked really good so thank you.

And thanks McGeek for the offer but Corp beat you to it. I appreciate it though.

[Dizzydude]

Well I just wanted to write a more formal thank you:

In English we had to do some sort of presentation that related the film, American Beauty with the novel, Death of a Salesman. I was in a group with two other guys and we had less than a week to pull this off. We were brainstorming ideas when a buddy in the group said we should do a game show, so soon after we decided on Jeopardy. I've worked plenty with Flash before, making pretty crude yet entertaining animations, but never games, but still it was more of a psuedo-game and I thought I could pull it off.

Being Jeopardy there would have to be six categories, with five questions under each ($200, $400, etc.). Our group split up the work so we would each do 10 questions, all varying in difficulty, all sort of relating to both stories and then coming up with a personal reflection on each of them as well. At first it was just me and a buddy (Aedan) who wanted to do this, but then some random (Ethan) showed up and was kind of shoed into our group, we expected the worse and thought he wouldn't finish the questions until Sunday in the evening (at the time, the presentation was due the next Monday, which gave us six days).

Now this was a little harder than expected, but eventually we all apparentlyfinished by the end of that week. Well to be honest I didn't work too hard on them, but I finished them on the Saturday and our teacher extended the deadline to the Tuesday, giving us one more day to 'polish' things up. So that Saturday I thought I'd better start the Flash movie, and I basically got everything set up graphics wise, and I put in about three of my questions. It was moving VERY slowly, but I was getting it done, yet there was still a problem, whenever I clicked on a score, the question would come up, yet the scores would not disappear from the question slide (like they were 'bleeding through' which made the question very hard to read), this could not work like this. I thought I'd try and fix it tomorrow when Aedan would bring his questions and 'help' me. Ethan sent me his questions that day in very rough form, asking which five out of the seven-ish or so I liked best, so that he could write paragraphs for them. I just said they're all pretty good and for him to choose which one he likes (making sure they vary in difficulty) and to put them in a certain format (which made it a lot easier for me to put into the flash movie).

So that Sunday (two days before it was due) I did a little bit more work, finished a column, and I still had that problem. It was late and I figured once I did fix the problem the next day, that it would move a lot more smoothly. Wishful thinking.

School on that Monday (the day before we presented) went by and I came home, did the usual routine, finished some stuff before dinner and I gave Aedan a call and he came over and gave me some of his questions and I showed him what I got done. He liked the look of it but I made him a little bit nervous about the issue I was having, I said I'd take care of it and not to worry about it. This was at about 6pm. He left after an hour and I really sat down and started working trying to figure out this problem. I was having no luck. At 8pm Ethan sent me his questions and I was happy, but felt the pressure. There is only one person that I know that knows quite a bit about flash, yet he dropped out of school due to drugs and he's not all there anymore, but luckily he was on MSN so I sent him some messages and he began to help me. I was very excited and thought that this was over. Oh little did I know, things were just getting started.

He helped me for a little bit of time, yet trying to explain what I needed was hard, and his explanations for what I needed to do were even harder. So he sent me some examples but they only confused me further, and even though he had the right idea, I just couldn't implement it in without better instruction. 11pm and Aedan sent his questions. So alright I was starting to get extremely desperate. I thanked him (MSN buddy) and continued my quest on Google. Oh I should say during this time I think, I began going through the questions and changed any errors (grammar wise and spelling) so I could be ready when I finally got this thing working. I finally found something, it was on FlashKit.com (a site that has helped me plenty in the past). It was a thread from like 2004 or earlier I think, but it had a guy that ran into the same exact problem for his Jeopardy game. It was answered, yet it made no sense to me what-so-ever. I'd try anything so I registered and posted in the thread. The funny thing is with their forums it says that you WILL not see it updated for some time, so be patient. Time is what I had little of. I had been working on this thing for like seven hours (I think it was around 1am) with no luck. I was tired and pissed off. I waited. And waited. Finally my post showed up. So I waited. I realized that the thread for some reason, did not go to the front page. **** this forum lol, shitty coding. I was ready to just 'borrow' (ie. steal) a jeopardy game off that site, add my questions, save it then bring it to class. I was ready to quit.

Before I lost all integrity by stealing a project to pass as my own, I thought I'd post here to see if anyone could help. It's a big community with a lot of tech-oriented people, so I thought just maybe. And even though I don't come here very often, mostly because I don't really know anyone anymore due to not visiting very often (and that a lot of people have left and other reasons), and that no one really talks to me anymore lol. So anyway I posted just after 2am, after working eight hours on this thing, this was my last effort haha.

After constantly refreshing between Flashkit (just in case haha) and this thread for 20 minutes, Corpasp posted. I couldn't believe the luck. Either life is playing a really cruel joke on me and leading me off, or this could actually be the man that would help me, so I added him to MSN. I gave him my story and he said that he could help me. I sent away my movie and he agreed that he would pretty much do it for me. I was in shock, and to be honest, a little skeptical. I guess after working in retail you really wonder about the state of humanity and people's values. But I thought I had nothing to lose so I let him work. An hour went by and he gave me little updates about what was happening, and the whole time I had a feeling that something like "Oh got to go out with the boys, sorry I couldn't finish this bud" would happen. But I had faith, and was growing increasingly nervous as another hour went by (it was 4:30am by this time). Now keep in mind, I need quite a bit of sleep to function normally the following day, so at this point I knew it was going to be a real challenge even waking up for school, let alone presenting something. In the meantime I got already for bed so I could just collapse once this ordeal was over. And during this whole time of waiting my mind kept trying to fool me into going to sleep, my house cools down quite a bit at night so I was shivering. "Go get a blanket it'll keep you warm" my mind would tell me. "Just rest your eyes for a second, you'll feel better". I would not let the Sandman get to me and I persevered.

I heard my dad get up and go to work at about 5:30. Corpasp said it would only be a couple more minutes. He was right, ten more minutes (5:40am) and my project was sent to me and I took a look at it and it was beautiful. He gave me instructions on how to quickly add in the questions so I thanked him a bunch and put in the questions. I finally got to sleep just after 6 and woke up two hours later for school. I got up and ended up sleeping on my couch during first period, but I eventually got to school just before second. Well English came around and it was our turn to go. Put in the flashdrive, and tried to start the movie. It was just white. My heart was racing. Serious!? I told the teacher it wouldn't work so he let us go the next day with no penalties. I felt bad but was happy that I would be getting a good night sleep. That night I did actually fix some question problems so I am kind of thankful, although minor I'm glad those were all polished. But the next day everything went smoothly (the computer had an older version of flash that couldn't play my movie, so I made it work in the older version). We ended up getting an 85 on it (which is mad good since he's an ass of a marker).

Holy **** I wrote a lot, but after going through my Flash movies tonight I realized I never thanked you enough (in my mind). So thank you a lot Corpasp, you helped me out immensely. You worked on that for a solid 3 hours! After working retail your faith in humanity kind of dwindles, but your generosity is extremely refreshing. You did not have to do this at all, so I thank you. If you were in my city I'd buy you a 24 pack. At least.

Applause.

Oh and I figured out the times throughout this story from emails and by right clicking -> properties on files. I didn't actually record this down or anything. lol. Even though I write too much, I'm not that weird.