Preloader 'strobes' my movie

I know this subject is exhausted but I have followed all the different tutes on this site and I always get the same result…My movie ‘blinks’ on and off continuously after I test.

The most recent tute I am following is the ‘simplepreloader.fla’. Am I supposed to add some actionscript to make the blinking stop.

help! I am exhausted:sleep:

Add a stop action at the end of your Scene, that way it won’t loop back to the beginning. Tah Dah, problem fixed.

sorry for my newbie response…but where should I add the Stop action?

Thanks!

on the very last frame of your movie. Otherwise it will loop back around and replay the preloader.

So if you are preloading from Scene 1 and it goes and plays Scene 2, you will add a stop() action on the last frame in Scene 2

I only have one scene.

This scene basically contains all of my naviagtion. When you click on the nav buttons, it loads the new .swf on top of the naviagation. Is this a correct method?

You can see what I am talking about at www.svengali-fx.com (work in progress).

If I add a new scene, should I move all the nav contents onto scene 2 and only have the preloader in scene 1…and will the preloader work on all the other .swf without putting a preloader in the other movies?

thanks for your help Beta.

Ok, you don’t need to preload in a new Scene (I do, but that is only because I am more comfortable with that method, it is really personal preference I suppose).

Since you are preloading in the same Scene, just add a stop() action at the end of that Scene, that way it won’t loop around and Play the beginning frames where you’re preload is.

If your movie must loop for any reason you can add this to your last frame…

gotoAndPlay(3)

(this is assuming your preloader takes up the first 2 frames of your scene, if it is more or less, just change the number to be the frame right after your preloader)

The action commands I have inserted have worked. Much thanks

However, when the initial NAV .swf loads, the preloader works perfectly. Next the main page contents load on top in a new .swf. I have inserted a preloader on that .swf and added the gotoandplay command. The GOTOANDPLAY also works…BUT

as the content .swf loads, you briefly can see the preloader and then it disappears and you are left with the NAV .swf resulting in a blank content area until those assets load. I am hoping the preloader will stay on the screen and show the loading progress as the main .swf loads. (as this is the largest file)

check it out to see if you can duplicate this situation - www.svengali-fx.com

any thoughts?

It looks to me as though you have a 2 frame preloader

The first frame contains the actions for preloading, and the second has a gotoAndPlay(1) action so it loops the preloader.

Am I right so far?

Ok, now my “theory” is that you only have your preload animation in frame 1, this is causing your moving to play the preloader, then have a blank frame, then play the preloader, then the blank frame, over and over again until it finishes loading.

Since I don’t have a .fla, I can’t tell for sure if that is the problem, but the symptoms sure fit.

I work on a mac and have stuffit. The version I have will only create .sit and .sea files (no zip). Although I can unstuff .zip files. When I try to download .fla files from Kirupa, it opens a .php in the browser and is garbled info, so I am out of luck on those files unless they are zipped. If you know of a way to upload my fla I will do so in a heart beat. They are too big to upload as fla files.

With respect to my preloader dilemma:

So, for my index .swf that contains my NAV elements I inserted a Stop command in frame two of the preloader. It works.

In my main.swf that contains all of the content for the ‘home’ page I inserted a GoToAndPlay frame 2 at the end of the clip because I need it to loop (and then moved everything over one frame and changed it to frame 3 per your suggestion). Same result. The index page shows a preloader with progress for a split second and then the page is blank until the content loads…and I think that is once the 3rd frame is loaded as the animation is slow the first time through leading me to believe that the contents are loading on the fly.

Can you upload the .fla onto your server and send me a direct link. It works for me to download like that since I am on a Windows machine.

you should be able to get the two .fla files.

they are _main.fla and svengali.fla

so I think you are going to go to www.svengali-fx.com/_main.fla and retrieve the file. hope it works

I got them, now I am off to find the problem :slight_smile:

Here, I included an attachment of what I think is a fixed version.

What I did was in the _main.fla movie You have a completely empty frame in frame 2, this caused the strobing I think… So what I did was selected all your frames after frame 2 and moved them back 1.

I uploaded it to my server and I only got the preloader once instead of like 5 times like it did before.

I hope it helps

<B>EDIT: </B> The file was too big to attach… so here is a link to it…

Fixed Version FLA

It is in .zip format. Which I find kind of weird that stuffit can unzip .zip files but can not create .zip files…hmm…odd.

I actually had the movie start in frame 2 before we tested the frame 3 theory.

It still doesn’t want to show the preloader for the _main.swf.

Do you think having it load on top of the svengali.swf is hiding the progress bar?

Do you think putting the _main.swf contents in Scene 2 of svengali.swf could remedy the situation? I am stumped.

I uploaded the files to my server and tested it. I got the preloader for both sections. They flash really quick because there isn’t much content to load and I have a cable modem, but I definietly saw them there.

Here is the example (if you already loaded it once, it will only show the preloader once because the first one goes so fast it skips over it)…
TEST EXAMPLE

I see the same thing happening.

Yes both preloaders are gone quickly. However, on the _main.swf the preloader disappears as soon as the NAV and Svengali graphic load…but it takes awhile for the main content to load leaving the center blank. How can the preloader stay on the screen (preferrably showing progress) until all of the contents are displayed.

I am on a 56k modem on my mac…but I can also test on a PC with cable modem…the PC is old but on that…the preloader for the _main.swf flutters on the screen (i.e. it shows up in the center of the screen and then bounces up a couple of inches and then goes to the center again…about 5 times before it is loaded…plus there is no progress bar…just the opening load bar.

Geez, I don’t know how to fix the problem if it works fine on my side and works bad on your side.

Are you using the preloader componant? Or were you coding it? I thought I saw the preloader componant in there.

OK.

I’m going to leave this problem and move onto building out some of the other areas of the site. I called a friend to try it and they said it loads super fast and the preloader is only up for a second (sounds like your experience)…so hopefully it is done.

Thank you for all your time and HELP!!!

No problem. If you still experience problems with it later one try not using the preloader componant (we seem to get a lot of loading issues with that), instead look up the preloader tutorials on www.kirupa.com or in the tutorials section at www.flashkit.com

You are bound to find some good ones at either or. For the % loaded one, that would be more towards www.flashkit.com just click on the tutorials section, and in the search box, check for Percentage Preloaders or something.

Yes I am using the component. So if problems arise I will go back and use some of the code in one of the other tutorials. Just to recap in case some other lost soul encounters the problems I just did:

Today

We corrected the ‘strobe’ effect in the initial load of the preloader and .swf by adding a Stop command after the second frame (which also was the last frame). That solved my NAV page problem.

For the main contents page that loaded and had an animation of 90 frames that needed to loop, we added a ‘gotoAndPlay frame 2’ in the last frame of the movie so that the movie would not reload the preloader everytime it looped but it would loop the animation.

Thanks lostinbeta!