assigning visibility to a variable movie clip name

you're welcome.

a little more precisely: ivar is property assigned to each of your mainmenu movieclips that makes it easy for those movieclips to determine their own "i" value.

you could also use their _name property and the flash string methods to extract that i value, but it's easier to just assign a property to each movieclip.

this property can be retrieved any time. in particular, when one of your mainmenu movieclips are clicked, it's now easy to make _visible the appropriate mainmenuX_clicked and submenuX movieclips.

I beleive so, yes.

menuItemMC is the sibling of _root.main["submenu"+X]? so, clip=main?

My apologies, yes you are correct, mainmenuX is not the parent of _root.main["submenu"+X]. It is a sibling as well. In the XML structure (which I am using to populate the menus), it is a parent, but not the flash structure.

menuItemMC does not contain any child movie clips. It is basically a colored rectangle, with a dynamic text field. The way the actionscript works, an empty clip is created and instances of menuRolloverItemMC is placed in that empty clip dynamically populating the menu items.

menuRolloverItemMC does not contain any children either, it is basically a twin of menuItemMC, with a background image at 0% opacity.

I hope that helps. I'm feeling like a nitwit.

Steve

mainmenuX is not the parent of _root.main["submenu"+X].

does menuItemMC contain a child movieclip name "submenu"? does it contain several submenu movieclips like submenu1, submenu2 etc?

does menuRolloverItemMC contain any child movieclips that are relevant?

mainmenuX is the parent of _root.main["submenu"+X].

mainmenuX_clicked is a sibling of mainmenu and exists on a lower level to appear behind mainmenuX.

Three things happen when mainmenuX is released.

1. A loop statement assigns false to the visibility for all "submenu" and "mainmenuX_clicked" clips.

2. _root.main["submenu"+X] becomes visible.

3. mainmenuX_clicked becomes visible.

That the basic jist of it.

Steve

what is the relationship between _root.main["submenu"+X] and mainmenuX and or mainmenuX_clicked?

tempPath3 can't possibly be a movieclip reference. it doesn't even look like a movieclip reference. if you used:

tempPath3 = [this + "._clicked"];

that would, at least, look like a movieclip reference, though it's not.

if the movieclip has instance name _clicked and it's on the timeline that contains your code use:

this["_clicked"];

or

this._clicked;