So I teach a basics of Hype class at a local college every spring semester and tonight I was having the students stepping through making a basic animated menu that survives all scene changes by using persistent symbols. Had a student show me their menu that would only work if I clicked on it twice. I couldn’t figure out why. So I took the file home and deleted everything I could out of it until all that’s left is an ellipse that is supposed to animate on a motion path. The thing is though, the ellipse doesn’t move. It’s like there’s an action on the symbol’s timeline telling it to pause at the beginning, except there isn’t. It’s the damnedest thing. See attached zip. If you check the symbol’s timeline, there’s an animation, but it never animates on previewing. Anyone seen this before?
Make sure you check Symbol Actions in the properties of the Symbol. You can address a subset of actions from there. Seams like your student removed the play action that is usually automatically added. I often remove it too because I don’t want the main timeline influencing my symbol timeline like this … did this help?
Strange! Persistent main timelines always auto start by default for me in the program. Usually I have to add a main timeline pause action inside the symbol to work around it.
To clarify, did you have to click the + ‘add keyframe’ to view the blue line that red arrow is pointing at? Does that effectively make this something that’s invisible to the user until this action is taken? Am I understanding the behavior correctly?
The auto start is not an inherent feature of the symbol but rather a symbol action slapped onto the symbol by the IDE when adding it to the stage. It feels very “inconsistent” because the IDE handles adding persistent and regular symbols different. Persistent symbols don’t get an autoplay and regular symbols do. The other thing to watch out for is that converting a symbol doesn’t remove or reapply a symbol action. Meaning if you started with a regular symbol it has the auto start applied … now if you convert it to a persistent symbol it keeps the auto start and vice versa.
The rationale behind this follows the logic that persistent symbols are mainly used across scenes and any animation in them will be triggered deliberate by some action and shouldn’t rerun when a new main timeline is loaded on scene changes. Regular symbols only remain for the duration of the scene so the thinking is that they should run in that scene.
At least that is my interpretation of this dynamic.
PS: One other thing is that if you choose to automatically add persistent symbols to new scenes they don’t get the auto run. Copy and Pasting the symbol from scene to scene does transfer the symbol actions if you added some.
