Since a colleague of mine recently went nuts over this behaviour, I thought: let’s blog the solution to the world
Problem
When you’ve got a vector shape with a bitmap (like jpg, png, etc) on top of it, both nested in a movieclip or sprite, you’ll experience quirky alpha behaviour. You’ll see the outlines of the bitmap image when the container’s alpha value falls below 1, even if the colors of the vector shape and the bitmap image are the same color. The pixels of the vector layer and the bitmap layer don’t behave as being 1 layer. You can make them do so by applying a layer blendmode to the sprite.
To apply a layer blendmode to your MovieClip, do this:
myMovieClip.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;
Here an example of the different behaviour (source: CS5 fla file)
While working on the Tommy Hilfiger Denim website, I encountered an extremely weird error. After deploying an alpha version of our work to our staging environment, I found out that on other machines the flash player only showed a blank screen and didnt execute any code at all. I checked the lack of code-execution by trying to trace a message to FireBug. Regrettably, the Firebug console stayed empty…..
After several tests it appeared that the website was working only on browsers with the Flash 10 Debug Player and simply died instantly after initiation on browsers with the regular Flash player 10. Yes….. you’re reading this correctly. It’s exactly the opposite of what you’d expect! The app crashes on the regular player and works fine on the debug player. The debug player didn’t even display an error message!
