Hiding and Unhiding Movie Clips on Command Using _visible and !

Hiding and unhiding movie clips can be a little tricky; sure, you can click on them to make them invisible, but often when _visible (the property that defines whether or not a symbol is displayed on stage) is set to false, the movie clip becomes inactive and can’t be clicked. If you use an external clip or button and an if statement to determine the state of visibility, you’ll end up with the same problem. You’ll be able to make it disappear, but it you won’t be able to make it reappear by resetting the value to true. Flash is just funny that way, so we’ll have to be “funny” too, and do this in a bit of a roundabout way that, in the end, is much simpler than the straightforward method (which would involve first fetching the value of instance._visible, then using it in an if statement, then doing various other things that you don’t even want to bother with).

Start off by creating the movie clip that you want to hide and unhide. For the sake of the lesson I just created a quick scribble with my tablet pen, then selected all of the fills and converted them to a movie clip symbol (F8).