Doublick on your circle_mc to bring yourself inside the movie clip. Create three layers. The bottom one should be called circlehave your circle in it. Above that should be a layer named labels and and one named actions. Now insert a blank keyframe in frame two of each of the three layers. Add a stop script to both action frames. On the labels layer label frame one “circle” and frame two “nocircle”. Leave frame two of the circle layer as it is – totally blank.

While this may seem a weird way to approach this I’ve found this is the simplest way to insure that you won’t get flashes of your object on screen after you’ve collected it. We’re going to need to repeat this for the other objects, but to show you how this works, go back to your rooms_mc and click on the circle again so you can place some code on the movieclip. Add this code to your clip:

onClipEvent(load)
{ this.onPress=function()
{ gotoAndStop("nocircle");
_root.inv_mc.circle2_mc._visible=true;
_root.circlelocated=”Located”;
}
if(_root.circlelocated=="Located")
{ gotoAndStop("nocircle");
}
}

As you can see, when this clip loads there is a function created when you press the clip. The function sends the circle clip to “nocircle” (which makes it seem to disappear) and then it makes the circle in your inventory visible and changes the variable we set on the root “circlelocated” to "Located". Then, each time the clip loads it checks to see if the circle has been located – if it has, it sends the clip to "nocircle" and it remains invisible. You’ll need to do this for your other clips as well, but for right now save and test your movie.

When you click on the circle it should disappear from the room and appear in your inventory. Furthermore, as you navigate around the room and back to where you found the circle it should NOT reappear. If it does, you’ve got a typo somewhere.

Now go ahead and make the “circle/nocircle” frames inside the square and triangle (calling them by the correct names, obviously) and cut and paste the code above onto the clips (changing the shape names there too.) Your save and test your movie – it should work something like this:

Inventory part II

Okay, now we’ve got objects in our rooms and we can collect them into our inventory, but once they’re there, we can’t do anything with them. We want to be able to drag them around, have them return to the inventory when we’re done with them and see close up views to learn more about them. Lets get started with that.

Enter your inventory movie clip and go to the actions panel of frame one of the actions layer. Lay your hands on that scratch paper where you wrote down the x and y locations of your objects, or if you didn’t do that, get that information now.

First convert the large background rectangle on your inventory's background layer to a movieclip called background_mc and give it an instance name of background_mc. This is important because we’ll be using hitTest to determine if the object should snap back into place and hitTest only works between two movie clips.

var square2_mc:MovieClip;
square2_mc.onPress=function()
{ square2_mc.startDrag(); }
square2_mc.onRelease=function()
{ if(square2_mc.hitTest(background_mc))
{ square2_mc.stopDrag();
square2_mc._x=-65.3;
square2_mc._y=6.3;
}
}

The x and y values should obviously be the x and y values of YOUR square. Test your movie. Once you collect your square and have it in your inventory you should be able to click on it there and drag it whereever you want. If you let go of the mouse button while you’re still on top of the inventory it will snap back into place in the inventory. If you drag it into the rooms and then onto the inventory it will snap back into place when you click. Add this code for the other shapes (including the key shape) making sure to change the x and y values to match the location of the object. Then test your movie. It should work like this: