Fire Clips

The library of fire clips gives you a variety of fire effects that can enhance the realism of your visuals. The library consists of:

• Looping Effects
  • Small Row of Fire
  • Medium Row of Fire
  • Tall Flame
  • Licking Fire
  • Dancing Fire
  • Ceiling Fire
  • Full Fire
  • Rolling Fire
• One-Time Effects
  • Explosion
  • Fireburst
  • Sparkburst

What is the Difference Between this and CS Effects?

The Fire Clips are essentially pre-recorded videos of the different flames. Flash will let you scale the clip, rotate it, mask it, distort it, etc., but you cannot change the properties such as wind like you can with flame you create with CS Effects. If you want to create a fireball-type of effect, you should use CS Effects.

Using the Fire Clips

It is pretty easy to use a Fire Clip: open the Components panel (Window > Components, or, for Flash Professional, Window > Development Panels > Components), and open the folder (click on the plus sign) marked CommandSim Fire Clips:

Click on the effect you want and drag it onto the Stage into the desired position. You can scale, rotate, distort, mask, or apply any other type of Flash effect to the clip. To simulate more than one fire, you can copy the clip and paste it somewhere else on the Stage, to simulate as many fires as you need.

Note: The fire clips add a fair amount to your visual's file size. For example, the "Full Fire" Fire Clip adds about 600 Kb to your file size, and the largest clip, Rolling Fire Fire Clip, adds about 1.75Mb. This typically will not affect playback but if you are sharing your visuals over the Internet, you always want to keep an eye on the size of your SWF. If you need smaller file sizes for these components, email us and we can provide you a solution (albeit at a lower visual resolution).

Advanced Information

The effects can be controlled programmatically to a certain extent. This section gives a bit more detail about the effects and how they can be controlled.

Looping Effects

Typically, you will use several fire effects in the same scene. Often, the same effect, such as licking fire, will be duplicated in multiple places over your photo. If the fire clip always started the sequence of images from the same starting image, it would look strange to the viewer because all the flames of the same type would be perfectly synchronized (since they are the same video).

To make visuals more realistic, therefore, we include a property that indicates whether or not you want to start the fire from a random starting point within the sequence of images. By default, this is set to true. If you set this to false, then all fire clips of the same type in the same visual will be exactly synchronized.

Advanced users may want to pause or restart the fire clips. Two methods (in the programming sense) are provided:

• pause() - Pauses the running sequence of images
• start() - Re-starts the playing of the images.

One-Time Effects

These effects are those which typically will play once and stop (Explosion, Fireburst, Sparkburst). By default, they play once through. You can control them programmatically by using the following methods:

• reset() - Resets the clip to the beginning, but does not start it playing
• pause() - Pauses the playing of images
• start() - Re-starts the playing of images from the point at which it was stopped (or from the beginning, if it was reset).