_root

[Martin]

Can someone explain what _root points to, and why I'd use it?

[zylum]

_root refers to the main movie. the main movie in essence is a movie clip and its instance name is '_root'. you could treat _root as you would any other movie clip such as its position (_x,_y), whether it's visible or not, its width and height... a usefull application would be if you wanted to make your whole movie fade in you would do something like this:

code:

_root._alpha = 0 _root.onEnterFrame = function() {         this._alpha += 1 }

this would be alot easier than doing the same thing to all your movieclips in your movie...

-zylum