I recently read a good article on preloading.
It basically said to create one SWF called Loader.SWF, which does nothing but load Main.SWF, and show a nice loading progress bar. That way you can develop Main.SWF without thinking about pre-loading at all, since it will all be handled by Loader.SWF.
This sounded like a really good, clean solution, until I realized that I dont think it applies to me. My Main.SWF itself load external assets, such as images and mp3’s. So the above technique doesnt work, I dont think. The Loader would load Main.SWF, show the loading bar at 100%, and then pass control to Main.SWF. Except now Main.SWF still has to load stuff, so the Loader.SWF really didnt do its job completely! I hope you can follow my thinking.
Now I think I could fix this by actually embedding the images and mp3’s into Main.SWF. That way, when Loader.SWF finishes loading Main.SWF, then everything truly is loaded and ready to go. (Am I correct in assuming this?)
But suppose I cant or just plain dont want to put all the assets into Main.SWF. What is the alternative? Can I make Loader.SWF load Main.SWF, AND the images and mp3s? And only pass control to Main.SWF once everything is loaded? Would this work? And if so, how would I access the image and mp3 assets from Main.SWF? Because now Loader.SWF owns them doesnt it?
