Flash menubar stuff

I'm doing some flash practice for some websites I'll be doing soon (people like flash...). Hopefully someone with some experience with flash will be able to help me here.

I'm making a practice menubar, which is hierarchical (i.e. each section has a sub-menu). When you click on the button on the main menu, the main menu will "fold away" or move somehow, and the sub-menu will "fold down" or somthing.

I figgered the best way to do this would be to have a movie clip for each menu, which consists of the folding down animation and the folding up animation, and in the middle (once its folded down) a piece of actionscript to stop it (so it stays down). Then I have a button which would start the movie clip playing, and so it folds up. The last frame of the clip has "_root.play()" in it to advance to the next frame in the main movie.

However, once its folded up, I want the main movie (not the movie clip) to navigate to another frame which another clip of a different menu is in (and so you get a new menu).

Currently, I have a blank frame with a piece of actionscript saying "gotoandplay(framenum)" where framenum is a variable. BUT.... this variable would be set by a button which is in the movie clip... so would it still be global? If not, how do i make it global? Ive tried putting a var at the beginning of the movie (first frame)... no joy

And also, how do you make motion smooth in flash? Everything seems to be jerking around, and the "ease" function still makes them jolt to a stop at the bottom of the folding out sequence :S

www.nicholaslidster.plus.com/menubar5.swf

 

make a new scene instead of inserting a new clip. on click, goto scene 2 frame 0.. (that's not actual script, just a logic)

 

Hmm, makes sense....

So I basically have it all going on the same timeline, with normal animation (not in a movie clip symbol), and have it jump to specific scenes. Hmm... interesting. Ill give that a go.

But the question still stands, how to I get it to jump there AFTER the animation of it folding away has finished? I thought, using a variable... but it doesnt like that for some reason

 

when it hits the last frame where there is any action, the next frame should be "goto frame 0 of scene2"

 

Aha, I've worked out a much better way of doing it.

Have the menubar slide about using actionscript (much smoother than tweening) and when its out of view, simply swap the symbol so it displays the correct information. Excelent