ToM project technical report: Flash 8 compatibility
Only a week slower than planned, our ToM project is going better than expected — things could go much worse, and they have.
So far we’ve finalized the Flash movies, and I have written a C# program to control the Tobii eye tracker, display Flash movies, and record eye movements. One of the trickest things with this setup is that we have to get the timing of each frame in the Flash movies because Flash’s frame rate is notoriously imprecise. I’ve figured out a solution — using ExternalInterface in Flash 8, and the test program I wrote worked very well. But when I added the actionscript to the flash movies that were made for us, it did everything in the script but the ExternalInterface calls.
After many tests, the problem — as usual — is very easy. Flash 8 offers many options in publishing the SWF file, one of which is to make it Flash6 compatible. The Flash guru set it as the default, as if this were going to be released on the internet. The problem is ExternalInterface was introduced in Flash 8, and Flash 6 simple ignores.
So, I had to go back to every FLA file, change the publish setting (CTRL-SHIFT-F12) to Flash-8, and deselect HTML output, publish, Save (CTRL-S), and close (CTRL-W).