This advanced multilevel tree menu will display your menu items in an impressive way. Menu items will fade into the Flash applet, each time you select a parent menu item. It supports background images for both the applet and the menu items.

Adding menu items and URLs

It is very important that you read the section Working With Tree Fields in the VAC manual. This section tells you how to include the menu items and how to use the tree field.

The menu colors

You can set a variety of colors in this menu. This menu works in two ways, you can either have a background image for all the menu items, or you can customize the existing menu item background which is built into the menu. The item background and border colors will be overridden if you specify a menu item background image. The item text and highlight colors are used for the two modes. The item highlight color is the color that the item text will change to when you move the mouse across a menu item. It will slowly change into that color depending on the fade speed setting. The applet's background color will be overridden if you specify a background image.

Level displacements, Item size and Item Fade speed

The vertical and horizontal level displacement are used to displace the subitems for the parent menu items, measured in pixels. The horizontal displacement is recommended to be set to above 40 pixels. The vertical displacement is not recommended to be set to higher than the menu item height. The menu item width and height are the dimensions of the menu items in pixels.
The item fade speed parameter will not only affect the speed of the fading effect, but also the speed of the color changing mouse over effect. Values between 5-20 are recommended. Put 100 to disable the effect and increase the menu speed.

Background Images

You can specify a menu item background image and a background image for the applet. These settings will override the background colors that you may specify.

Clicking Sound Effect

If you have an MP3 file in your personal folder, you will be able to select it for the menu items. The sound will be played when the menu items are clicked. Leave this empty to disable this.

Arrow Control

You can disable the arrow and let it stand still with these two check boxes.

Limitations

Due to a bug in Flash Player 5.0, you can have a maximum of 200 menu items in the Flash applet. More than that, and the applet will not work. Make sure you don't insert too many menu items. Flash is slow and this is a very complicated menu, too many items will increase the applet's initialization time significantly.

Other settings

There are other settings that are discussed on the following topics from the Advanced Effect Maker documentation:

Working With Tree Fields
The Flash Applet Size Parameters
URL Links and Frame Targets
Working With File Fields And File Lists
Working With Color Buttons
Compression Ratios for images
Working with fonts
Adding MP3 Sound Effects

Version history

1.5 : Added support for the ActionScript LoadMovie() command, which means that the effect can now be inserted into Macromedia Flash FLA projects. You can now load other .swf files or disable the links by entering empty links.

1.4 : Fixed a serious bug which occurred when you had more than nine 1:st level menu items.
1.3 : Added sound effects support (when clicking on a menu item), better arrow control for the menu items and fixed bug when displaying menu items.

Anibal Wainstein