A question about a big ole background image in Flash

programming flash
1

Howdy! Thanks for taking the time to read this… I’m relatively new to Flash and I’m loving it - I have a quick question which hopefully will be pretty easy for someone to help me out on…

I’m working on a site where they want a large background image sitting behind the various nav elements, etc.

I know about giving a Flash movie a transparent background, but apprently that only works on IE on Windows. This needs to work the same for Netscape, etc.

I have found a site that uses the effect: http://www.davidemmite.com/dep.html

Very cool - but I’m not sure how it’s being done. The background image itself shouldn’t cause any scrolling, and I’m guessing it will need to be quite big (1280x768 pixels) - like the site I listed above, if someone resizes their browser window, the background image should simply get cropped. Can anyone give me a helpful hint or two about how to approach this?

Many thanks in advance,
Zeep

2

Hmm, judging by what I saw on that site you can use 1 of 2 methods…

Method 1) http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/loadingrandombackground.htm

Method 2) http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/loading.htm (at the bottom you will see an image of George Bush that is loaded in, that is where the code for dynamically loading non-progressive jpg images is. It only works in Flash MX though :slight_smile:

3

Right on! Thanks, I’ll check it out - sounds like MX may be required though eh?

4

Nah, method 1 works just great and many people use that method still in Flash MX (due to the ease of adding a preloader to each file instead of creating a dynamic preloader) and the fact that they can use gif, jpgs, png or whatever, unlike dynamically loading images in with MX only allows non-progressive .jpg images.

5

lostinbeta, you rule my friend - thanks very much for the help! I’ve been doing web design for almost seven years now - can you believe I am just getting into Flash? Jeez…I’m kinda slow sometimes I guess.:sigh:

6

I am here to help man :slight_smile:

Flash is a great program, just be prepared for a lot of stress because its not always the easiest thing to work with :stuck_out_tongue:

And as for that Flash MX reference you made before, I would look into buying Flash MX in the future, it overall is better than Flash 5, just the interface takes A LOT of getting used to.

7

You could do it in flash 5 if you use the load movie method. for more details, P M me.

8

and zeep… believe me… you’re better off getting into Flash late. too many flash developers have not spent enough time doing real design work. The experiences you’ve had in color matching, pic design, and various other things will carry over into Flash… In addition, though lost is correct that Flash doesn’t always do what you think it should be doing… you should have a lot of experience with that sort of thing having worked in html. Same problems arise in either medium.