Well, this is my first post here!
So, hello everyone, I’m Dan! Nice to meet’CHA all!
Right, so basically i’m making myself a little portfolio site in Flash 8, and i’m going for an allways centered approach (by setting dimensions to 100 % but setting scaling to no scale).
So here it is so far : http://www.absolute-creations.net/v2/
Only the about button actualy does anything at the moment, but you can get the general idea. The page will flip in for each button.
And so here’s my problem :
Basically i’m not too familure with flash and the concepts of how it manages content.
I know that using the 100% noscale method that i cant simply move each page (which will be in its own movie clip) off of the screen, as if viewed in a high enough res, you’ll be able to see the pages that are supposed to be hidden.
Each page will be loaded as required (but only once, so they each load into a unique movieclip). The reason for this is that each page will be in the region of 25 - 30kb, and i really want to keep the initial load for the site to an absolute minimum.
So, does anyone have any advice on how to hide the pages when they arent needed?
I’m not sure if you can “destroy” and “create” movie clips when required in flash, or wether that would effectively unload any data in that clip that was loaded from an external file…
Also each page will have a subtle alpha effect going on (like the sun glare on my home page) so i’m not sure if simply using a mask to make the movie clips invisible would be enough… because i’m thinking 6 pages all with some form of effect going on might chug… i mean i know it probably would if they were all visible at once, but i’m really not sure if masked effects take less / next to no cpu time or if it makes no difference…!
Ha, well sorry about the rambling post, but i’m really not too sure quite how to put this all in simpler terms!
Any advice about my choice of navigation, how to hide the pages when not in use etc is greatly apreciated. I would really like to understand how flash manages data and cpu time with regards to visible and invisible elements too! 
Thanks all!
Dan.
