Changing movie clip position and appearance

To change the properties of a movie clip as it plays, write a statement that assigns a value to a property or use the setProperty() function. For example, the following code sets the rotation of instance mc to 45:

mc._rotation = 45;

This is equivalent to the following code, which uses the setProperty() function:

setProperty("mc", _rotation, 45);

Some properties, called read-only properties, have values that you can read but not set. (These properties are specified as read-only in their ActionScript Dictionary entries.) The following are read-only properties: _currentframe, _droptarget, _framesloaded, _parent, _target, _totalframes, _url, _xmouse, and _ymouse.

You can write statements to set any property that is not read-only. The following statement sets the _alpha property of the movie clip instance wheel, which is a child of the car instance:

car.wheel._alpha = 50;

In addition, you can write statements that get the value of a movie clip property. For example, the following statement gets the value of the _xmouse property on the current level's Timeline and sets the _x property of the customCursor instance to that value:

onClipEvent(enterFrame){
  customCursor._x = _root._xmouse;
}

This is equivalent to the following code, which uses the getProperty() function:

onClipEvent(enterFrame){
  customCursor._x = getProperty(_root, _xmouse);
}

The _x, _y, _rotation, _xscale, _yscale, _height, _width, _alpha, and _visible properties are affected by transformations on the movie clip's parent, and transform the movie clip and any of the clip's children. The _focusrect, _highquality, _quality, and _soundbuftime properties are global; they belong only to the level 0 main Timeline. All other properties belong to each movie clip or loaded level.

For a list of movie clip properties, see Property summary for the MovieClip class.