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Depths - How they work in Flash</H1>
<br> Tutorial Description - In pretty much any visual application dealing with multiple objects on the screen, you have to take in to consideration the arrangement of those objects; arrangement here meaning the relations of overlapping these objects have with each other, and when I say objects here, or pretty much anywhere else, I mean visual screen objects or instances such as movieclips, buttons and textfields. While working in Flash, you can control the overlapping through such methods as appropriately arranging layers in your timeline or taking advantage of arrangement options available in the Modify menu such as Send Backward or Bring to Front etc. This can be done with any symbol, text field or group allowing you to manipulate just how they appear on the screen in terms of overlapping - something which can be very important in your movie design.
Arrangement isn't restricted to the Flash authoring environment though. With actionscript you have similar control, being able to have direct control of how objects on the screen overlap by changing their arrangement or depth, as its commonly refereed to, from commands given in your code. In terms of actionscript, however, you only have control over MovieClip objects, Button objects and non-static TextField objects since those are the only screen elements which can be given instance names and therefore be referenced by actionscript. Groups and static text blocks will always remain at whatever depth they were when they were placed and arranged on the timeline (supposing you don't accidentally replace them, but we'll get to that later on).<br>
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