I have a product demo in Flash that’s roughly 1MB in size. When people access a page that this demo lives on, the demo doesn’t visibly “appear” until over half of the total bytes have already been loaded…
You can see this by clicking here, and seeing that by the time the swf materializes on the screen, the preloader progress bar is already over 50% (or so)…
How can I fix it so that at least something shows up right away, so that the user isn’t staring at a blank screen for 30 seconds? The preloader seems to work ok… Any suggestions?
i’ve had to deal with this same problem. the solution i’ve found involves how you load your symbols in for use in actionscript.
when you set up your linkages, all of the symbols have the option “load in first frame”. this causes all of those symbols to load in your movie before anything is displayed on screen.
the way to get around this is to uncheck that box for any symbol not included in your preloader, or needed as elements around the preloader. the only problem with that is you’ll need to physically put those symbols on stage somewhere after the first frame of you movie so that they will, in fact, load at some point. simply using MovieClip.attachMovie() will not force them to load later.
here’s what i do. i have the first frame of my movie load in a preloader clip, ususally an object that extends MovieClip. then, on frame two of three (because I rarely use animations on the main timeline), i drop all of my “load-later” symbols on stage, and put a script in that frame that moves all of those symbols to an unused positive depth (dummy_mc.swaptDepths(1039) or something), and use MovieClip.removeMovie() to remove it from the stage, so there’s no chance that they will be seen by the user.
once this frame is done and it’s executed all of its removals, i send it back to the first frame with a content loaded variable set (i.e. _global.isLoaded = true, or something like that), and then the movie runs its initialization code (setting up navigation elements, etc), and the preloader removes itself.
seems intense? not really, when you do the code. mostly it’s tedious dropping those clips onto the stage, but the good thing is that it will keep my first frame down to the size of the preloader (hoperfully just a couple KB) so the preloader can pop up easily, and then monitor the progress of the next frame, and all remaining movieclips.
Cheers deadlyhead! I will try this technique on my demo as soon as I get some free time… but this will **definitely ** come in handy on future projects!
Cheers deadlyhead! I will try this technique on my demo as soon as I get some free time… but this will **definitely ** come in handy on future projects!