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Update tween value while its tweening?

martis test
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Warning: Please note

This thread was started before GSAP 3 was released. Some information, especially the syntax, may be out of date for GSAP 3. Please see the GSAP 3 migration guide and release notes for more information about how to update the code to GSAP 3's syntax. 

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Hey guys,

 

Been wondering how to do this for quite some time now....

 

say I have a tween like

 

tl.to($box, 1, {x:$(window).width()});

 

Now, xPercent aside... I am wondering how I could update this tweens "x" target while its running... in case someone had resized the window.

 

I assume I could run an onUpdate method to update the tweens value?

 

Thanks!

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The short answer: xPercent is the best way to accomplish that sort of thing. 

 

The longer answer: 

It's a lot more complex than you might expect because imagine a width tween that's going from 0 to 100 over the course of 10 seconds linearly (this makes it pretty easy to visualize). So that's 10 pixels per second. Great. Now let's say when the tween is 20% complete (width:20), you suddenly want to change the end value to 200 instead of 100. It's quite simple to do internally (swap one value), but when it renders, you'll see a jump from 20 to 40 instantly because the tween's duration didn't change, and its progress was 0.2 (20%). In other words, 20% progress used to be 20 in the old tween, but it's 40 with the updated value. 

 

I assume you want things to be perfectly smooth (no jump from 20 to 40). The only way to accomplish that in the context of a tween is to adjust the starting value (in this case, make the starting width -25), but that means that if you reverse() or restart(), things will look pretty weird :)

 

So it's not a bug or problem with GSAP - it's just a logical impossibility. 

 

And actually, the xPercent thing would work the same way anyway - it'd jump, but since the user is dragging the window gradually, the jumps aren't so noticeable. 

 

All that being said, one other solution would be to do something like:

var time = tween.time();
tween.vars.width = 200; //your new width;
tween.seek(0).invalidate().seek(time);

That basically forces the tween back to its starting position, invalidates it so that on the next render it will re-parse the starting/ending values, and jumps back to the correct time in the tween. 

 

Also for the record, TweenMax has an updateTo() method that will adjust the starting values as I described above, but it doesn't work with plugins (including CSSPlugin) for some even more complex reasons, so it's not a viable solution here. 

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