I have a base movie , that is an introduction presentation ;
it will entertain visitors for a while ;
At the end of introduction presention or before that if the skip
button is pressed another movie clip will load over ;
This 2nd movie clip is a bit heavy to load , due to this fact I think
that it would be interesting to start the download to the cache
as introduction presentation loads and start to play (if skip
button is pressed then visitors will see the 2nd movie pre loader and will have to wait anyway) ; Once loaded in cache folder at the end of presentation visitors will not have to wait any longer to see the 2nd movie ;
what action I issue to the timeline of introduction presentation to load 2nd movie in background ?
Well … David
never tried pathToTargetClip before , don´t know yet how it works;
What I am trying to do is to start to load the 2nd movie clip (the heavy one ) as soon as the base movie starts up to run ;
if visitors get entertained with presentation mc , 2nd movie will be downloaded to the cache folder and as the presentation finishes will be loaded over the previous movie clip ;
base movie is a presentation that may take when finished 45 seconds , not quite sure yet ; that´s time enough for the 2nd mc to be downloaded "in background " and available for a fast and smooth loadmovieNUM ;
Well optimaly you want to use the loadMovie command on the first frame of the first movie.
the movie being loaded should have a stop action in it’s first frame, and be completely blank on the stage. if you put it in level1 then it will begin to load while everything else is playing. As long as it’s blank it wont interfier with anything.
Then the last frame of your first movie should contain an action telling that clip to play(); (and probebly telling the first movie to gotoAndStop(); at a ‘blank’ spot that you have set up.
There’s no reason to load it again, as far as I can see.
You might consider pre-caching if you’re going to add more movies than just one.
I built a e-learning app recently where a user could dip into a module at any point. It was likely (but not certain) that the user would then continue in a linear progression to the end of that module.
The app was set-up so that loading a specified swf (there we lots to keep file size down) i.e. going to a specific place in a module took primacy over everything else.
Once the specified swf had come down, the controller would try to second guess the progression of the user by downloading all the subsequent swfs in sequential order. If the controller got to the end of the module then it would start to load from the beginning up to the point where the user had started.
Flash doesn’t like stacking more than about 8 or 9 movies - performance gets a bit slow - so instead the swfs were loaded into an instance off-stage with each swf being displaced by the next swf. They then sat in the browser cache until they were wanted without clogging up the player.
could you please show me the commands on how you “downloaded” the movies to the cache without “loading” the movies to the scene ?
All that I Don´t want is to load a stopped movie with 1st frame blank , instead of this , as you mentioned in your post , movie will be downloaded to the cache and be available to be loaded to the scene by time or by demand when a button is pressed ;
create a blank movie clip off stage (far off stage) and give it an instance name… something like “holderClip”.
Perform your loadMovie(“file.swf”,holderClip); as you would normaly. As soon as the load function completes, the movie is both on the stage (offstage) AND in the cache. Then just set it to loadMovie(); on another file, but to the same location. The new loaded movie will unload the first one that was placed in the holderClip… but it will still be in the cache. You can then request a loadMovie(); method to your main location (onstage, where it will be displayed) and the swf will load from the cache rather than the server.
I’d work in something whereby that first movie is stopped on it’s first frame, or make it’s _visible equal to false, none the less… if you have something performing an action over there, even though it’s offstage, it will still use some of the processor speed. If you do end up going with the _visible=false method, remember to make _visible equal to true before attempting another loadMovie(); method on the same clip.
