[gwxthenewbie]

Because I've got a website that is around 600KB, it would take quite long on a 56K to load it all in one shot at the start. Instead, I prefer to load it scene by scene... as in.... go to scene 1 and in scene 1, it will launch the preload the sequence and verify if ONLY scene 1 is loaded. If scene 1 is completely loaded, it goes to an play a particular frame. Flash then goes to the frame and plays the animation and displays the rest of scene 1. Lets say the user selects Scene 2. What will happen is that the preload sequence will start again, ( this time residing in Scene 2 ), to verify if scene 2 is loaded completely before playing the rest of it.

I've seen this in many sites, such as netdogz.com ( plz go there to get a better picture of what im talking about )..... I think it should be possible to do so but may be quite difficult? i would like to hear from u if it is possible to work out such a preloader....

If you really don't get what I'm talking about... then please see http://www31.brinkster.com/gwxthebest/idea.html

I have based my entire almost completed movie on this concept of preloading one scene at a time, believing that it can be done. However, after browsing reference books, I guess it should be done another way and that what I want to acheive is called dynamic loading. The 'other way' is loading external SWFs through actionscript. Am i correct?.....

Thanks in advance for any solutions

[Timothee]

Hi gwxthenewbie,

FYI: scenes are not the most reliable feature of Flash. Most of the websites where content is loaded sequentially are done through external files, not through multiple scenes.

You can arrange to start playing scene 1 once only scene 1 is loaded. That's possible. Once reaching scene 2, you can again arrange for playing scene 2 if all its content is loaded and so on. However, if your movie starts with a menu where the user can select the scene where he wants to go, then if he/she selects the last scene, all the previous scenes have to be loaded before he/she can jump there (defeating the whole thing). In other words, scenes are not the best approach in making content where users can jump all over the place.

Now if the first part is good enough for you (that is preloading and playing sequentially), then you can check out the following entries in your actionscript dictionnary to build your preloader: ifFrameLoaded (deprecated but very convenient) and MovieClip._framesloaded. With MovieClip._framesloaded, you will need to know the frame number of the last frame of each scene and store that in some array. It's not a very flexible approach but that'll do.

Best luck,
Tim.