Questions about Symbol Timelines

I made a video to explain the issues I have encountered with Symbols: A few issues with Symbols

Thank you for your attention

4 minutes into the video - but the “issues” are still not defined - this should be tighter… You lost me.

It’s because you want to live fast and you don’t take the time to listen and understand. If I made a video it’s because it’s easier to explain than to write the whole issue down. I needed to put things into perspective. If you want to help/watch/listen only on minor issues, that’s up to you.

Thanks for the video! There are some concepts about timelines that I think will help clear this up and lead to the desired results.

Timelines have three properties to consider:

  1. Play state: whether it is currently playing or paused
  2. Playhead position: the current time the playhead is at
  3. Direction: if it is playing in the forward direction or reverse direction

The actions will affect these properties differently.

  • Start Timeline always sets the play state to playing, resets the playhead position to the beginning (0:00.00 or the duration if reverse is chosen), and the direction is based on the checkbox
  • Pause Timeline sets the play state to paused. It does not change the playhead position or direction, those will stay as they are.
  • Continue Timeline sets the play state to playing. It does not change the playhead position (though once playing this will advance of course). The direction is based on the checkbox.
  • Go to Time in Timeline only sets the playhead position. It does not change the play state or direction.

Hopefully that helps clarify some of the behaviors you are seeing. In some cases where it looked like nothing what happening, it was that you were using start timeline, it would run for one second, hit the start timeline action again, and just loop back. In other cases you were using go to time in timeline, but as it was not playing nothing would happen.

Really the short of it is that you should really be using Continue Timeline instead of Start Timeline and I think you’ll be achieving what you want.

There’s a few small points I’ll note:

  • If you use Go to Time in Timeline to a position that has a timeline action, but the play state is paused, it will not run the timeline action. Timeline actions are only run when it is set to be playing.
  • Why does the Start Timeline at 0:00.00 not infinitely loop back on itself? This is a special case we hard-coded as we figured many users might find this hard to debug or not yet know the difference between start and continue timeline; looping is a very common use case! The moment you move start timeline out from this position though it will loop back to the beginning.
  • Timelines start with a play state of paused. This is why the convenience feature of symbol instances is that they have a symbol action to at least start their main timeline. (The real exception is scenes will also start their main timeline automatically.)

It could be the case that symbols are appropriate for your document, but I will at least mention that you don’t need them for this example. You can make an alternate timeline within the scene and do the fade in and looping. This would also let you avoid custom behaviors.


The other point to address is the first part of your video. You seemed to need to re-add the symbol instance, but I didn’t see the problem. New symbols created from a selection also still have the symbol action set that kicks off the main timeline.

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Hi

Thank you for taking the time to watch my video and to reply.
But it seems that you don’t address the issue that I explain at time 06:15 of the video. Why properties only work when they start at time 0:00 and not when they start 15 frames later?

Hi jonathan
thank you, Continue Timeline solves the issue but I think that for this case, Edge Animate was doing something more in an easier way. The concept Start and Continue are a little bit confusing.

To clarify, this is because the following steps happen:

  1. The symbol's main timeline state is paused and the playhead position is 0:00.00
  2. The button triggers a custom behavior to Start Timeline for the symbol's Main Timeline. This sets the state to playing
  3. The playhead advances to the 0:00.15 time where it encounters a timeline action
  4. This timeline action is Start Timeline, thus the playhead position is moved back to 0:00.00
  5. The playhead advances to the 0:00.15 time where it encounters a timeline action
  6. This timeline action is Start Timeline, thus the playhead position is moved back to 0:00.00
  7. The playhead advances to the 0:00.15 time where it encounters a timeline action
  8. This timeline action is Start Timeline, thus the playhead position is moved back to 0:00.00
  9. ....etc and on and on

The properties do work before this time, but it is just looping (only in a forward direction) between 0:00.00 and 0:00.15.

So the right way to do this would be:

  1. Create your fade-in animation from 0:00.00 to 0:00.15.
  2. Add a Continue Timeline (forward) action at 0:00.15
  3. Create your grow/color animation from 0:00.15 to 0:01.15.
  4. Add a Continue Timeline (reverse) action at 0:01.15

Well, Edge Animate did require both symbols and javascript code for this and you had to keep track of direction yourself, so it depends where you want complexity :slight_smile:.

I did have some UI plans to only have one "Play Timeline" action with options for ["Always Restart", "Restart if complete", or "Never restart"] but I thought this too would be a bit hidden/confusing.

Continue is just like hitting the play button on a tape deck. You can think of Start as "rewind and play" or "restart".

All my tests show that

  • if we are on the Main TL, Start TL always work in my example.
  • but if it is a Symbol that is triggered by a button (thus an external object), Start TL does not work and only Continue TL works. What I wanted to say is that Adobe Edge Animate did not have that subtle difference. The Play Symbol feature worked under any circumstances. In Hype it is not the case.

Thank you very much for your replies. I warned my attendees that Hype has a great forum :wink:

It would be good to upload an example project so the Forum can analyze your set-up in something other than a speculative fashion.

In order to make this post more useful also for other I suggest to change the name of the post from “A few issues with Symbols” to “A few question about Symbols behavior”

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Do you mind providing a small zip of your .hype document about this? I don't think this would cause any differences in how it is triggered. Thanks!

From the video it seems like you were just hitting this special case where you had a start at 0 but then moved it to be later:

again... In order to make this post more useful also for other I suggest to change the name of the post from “A few issues with Symbols” to “A few question about Symbols behavior”

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