As an animator, its necessary to loop animations of an object easily within symbols and be able to call the looping timeline in the symbol or stop the looping (call another timeline in the symbol that isn’t looping). Currently there is a work-around in Hype that is not the easiest to use. It would be awesome if there was an option that was quick and easy to use that would cut down the work time that is necessary in the current work-around. In Sencha Animator, there was an option that was quick and simple:
Is there a possibility in future Hype updates that something like this will be implemented?
there are a lot of things which hype does that a symbol as you see it in flash or sencha wouldn’t do, e.g. symbols seem to always be linked to the timeline so if you play the timeline the symbol also plays so yeah it’s not ideal i fully agree with you. They’re not independent things, like a movieclip.
I wouldn’t even touch symbols atm honestly, they also have a bug where if i put a stop in the beginning of them they dont stop in Safari, only in Chrome… The work around is to shove your pause 5 frames into the symbol , which isn’t ideal. May I suggest just use different timelines, it’s way less hassle.
Have a character 1, 2 etc timeline and just call them when you need to. This way you can just loop the timelines, and they’ll still be relatively exactly where you want them to be on the main timeline.
Symbols are still just at an alpha level, just ignore them IMO unless you want a lot of headaches.
Just to clarify, is the main feature you want be able to set the number of times a timeline loops?
You can add a timeline action at the end of the timeline which starts it over again creating an infinite loop. Then you can continue/pause the timeline to start stop.
In your document there is likely a Symbol Element Action in the parent that is kicking off the timeline. You can simply delete that action if you don't want that behavior.
Thanks for that, but sadly that’s not enough for me to switch to use them. I’ve used behaviours in hype a lot and whether its a behaviour, a timeline pause or a js based pause a symbol does not pause on safari or on iPad if the pause is on frame one the same way a timeline will which is a bug id rather not have to deal with. (it will if you nudge it 3-4 seconds into it). Not to mention it still takes up time in my timeline(see movie clip’s ability to not preview in timeline unless asked) , if i make my timeline go to 1 second in , my symbol will also go 1 second in and i need to overwrite it, it’s not a recallable shape etc etc.
Groups are much more useful at this point, i may change my mind, and i definitely hope they become on the same level as flash movie clips. If you make symbols rescalable at least on the next version i may consider using them again, at this point they’re only usefull if you have a lot of objects that are static which you’d want group to make the timeline look cleaner.
symbolBug.zip (22.9 KB)
That’s the bug I was discussing, use safari for worst case scenario.
Also at this point symbols are linked to timeline like this
In an ideal world i’d like them to be more like this
Where you can chose when to add your symbol, and the symbol be not linked to the main timeline unless asked.
Otherwise they dont serve much benefit over timelines. Possibly at some point with the ability graphics have in flash
But at this point if you can make symbols scalable, with the contents scaling with it(along with that bug fix) that would definitely be enough to sell me on the idea on using them!
If you get rid of the Symbol Action then the symbols won’t play unless told by JS or behaviours, etc. On all of your Symbols you have a Symbol Action that starts the Main Timeline so when Scene is loaded all of them play which overrides your other actions. Is this what you mean by bug?
Perhaps the Hype guys can change the default behaviour or give us an option to set or unset this.
Hi dBear,
On the top symbol i have only 1 action
Main timeline is relative to it.
Symbol 2 pauses it on load
Symbol 3 pauses it with JS
I’m making an edit with something moving on the main timeline with a pause at the start to show that it will stop as intended at frame 0 but the symbols will still play. That’s the bug, unless I nudge the pause in the symbol to a few seconds in they will auto play, unlike the main timeline. Also use safari in case chrome works for you.
The only case the symbol won’t play is if i nudge any of those actions like i have in the bottom symbol
Refer to my picture in previous post. There is a symbol action in the properties section for all of your symbols that is Starting all of your symbol “Main Timelines” but overriding your timeline actions in each symbol. If you remove these then your symbols act as instructed. It seems that the symbol action in the properties in the main scene override the actions set in the individual symbols and I’m not sure if this is a bug or what.
Well thats bizarre, thanks for that i didn't realize it automatically made actions, on creating a symbol... but it doesn't make sense
so the logic of exporting doesn't go
main stage div
stage actions
symbol divs
symbol actions
The symbol actions should be overwriting the main stage actions and if not it should be showing a clash somewhere in the console, that is pretty bizzare indeed, but the bug is still there unless there is a checkbox i missed which says [x] overwrite symbol actions on frame 0 on launch
even more basic example , 2 symbols playing , i put a console log on each, one on frame 0 one a couple of frames down, again only the one a couple of frames down does the log
The original thought was that if you have animations on elements and you choose 'Convert to Symbol' and hit preview your document should look exactly the same as it did before converting to a symbol. This requires us to add the Symbol Action.
The other consideration was that we wanted the Main Timeline of the Symbol to play automatically so we add a Start Main Timeline Symbol Action on the parent's Main Timeline automatically.
We are definitely willing to consider changing this behavior (or at least adding a preference to not automatically add Symbol Actions). Feel free to add a comment if you have an opinion one way or another.
Thanks for reporting these and for the sample documents!
That definitely makes sense and I would consider the current behavior a bug. I'm looking into a fix for our next release.
It appears Timeline Actions at the beginning of the Symbol's Timeline are completely ignored if that timeline was triggered by a Symbol Action. I will investigate a fix for this as well.
There are a few tricky parts to get right, so I can't make any promises about when it will make it into a build, but we are definitely working on this.
Appreciate the help on that! I do quite like some of the benefits of symbols now that I know what’s been causing the automatic symbol playing. I’m in a team of 10 people working on hype doing ads and so far half of us tried symbols and gave up because of that behaviour, i tried continuously after with code or with disabling preloading/other work arounds but now that i showed them this i think quite a lot now will go back to symbols.
So yeah they’re a great feature, but some clear indication of that behaviour or have the symbol actions show up on the right panel like it does in flash would be a great addition. Thanks!
This makes sense. I don't mind this behaviour and as long as you know it does this then it's not so difficult to delete the action. I'm happy with the way it is.
Exactly. This is exactly what I was originally hoping for. A dialogue box or something that would save time looping instead of calling the looped timeline to stop in the main timeline. This would allow for someone like me (hardly any coding skills - I am an animator) to use Hype with ease.
I'm happy with the way it is.