flash (macromedia): A manual way of doing it is to put an instance of all the library items on frame
1 (of scene 1). This will force everything to load prior to the movie playing
forward. Keep in mind this will keep people waiting, and wondering if they
should go elsewhere.
warren

I'm really struggling with this preloader issue:

I have a Scene (Scene 1), consisting of 90 frames.
I have 9 movie clips, one every ten frames.
(ie: movie 1 is on frame 10, movie 2 on frame 20, movie 3 on frame 30...and so on)

I have control buttons on the main timeline (Scene 1) that control what frame to go to and stop.
When it stops on that frame, it's starts to play the movie-clip in that frame.

Each movie clip has an attached sound that I load on the first frame like this:

_global.Vocal1 = new sound():
Vocal1.attachSound("intro");
Vocal1.start(0,1);

I've tried several preloader examples, but none seem to be working.
They quickly flash on and then off. I know the file that I'm working with is huge,
that's why it leads me to believe it's not preloading properly.
I've even uploaded to my server and accessed it over the internet and it's still
incredibly quick....so it can't be working right. It's like it's just preloading the bytes
in the scene and not the bytes in each movie clip in that scene.

Here is my question (after the long but needed explanation):

How do I create a preloader that preloads all the compenents of my Scene at one time,
right from the beginning (everything, all the movie clips on every frame, all the attached
sounds).

I have to find a way for my movie to cue up exactly with the audio, almost like buffering.
Otherwise, depending on the users pc/processor, the timing will be all off.

Any help is greatly appreciated...thanks!

1- Add a scene to your movie
2- make it the first scene
3- drag 1 instance of every item from your library to the first frame of this
first scene (just piled on top of each other)
4- finally, place a rectangular colored box on top of all the items so that you
don't see them
5 - you could leave it at that, or add flashing *loading* text on top of the
rectangular box indicating to the viewer that something is happening.

I prefer to use the following in a preload scene:

Action on Frame 1:

ifFrameLoaded ("Scene 1", 17) {
gotoAndPlay("Scene 1", 1);
}

Action on Frame 2:

gotoAndPlay(1);


where *17* above is the frame number to have preloaded before proceeding the the
main scene.

That's ok if it takes a minute or so....it's not on line, it's on a cdrom.
How can I place an instance like that and run a preloader.
Do I just make a movie clip and then toss all the library items on that clip...??

Can you provide an example..that would really help me out.

I appreciate any help, thanks!

Well the real issue here is that preloader code doesn't work on cd-roms. Why? Because Flash is checking to see how much of the file is present on the disk, not how much of it is loaded into memory. In other words, Flash says "This file is 3 mb, how much of it do I have? 3mb. I'm done!" That's why your preloaders are disappearing quickly. And there's nothing that can be done about it.

First and foremost, if you put the cd on video and it plays correctly, there's nothing to worry about. However, if the movie pauses...

You could put all your symbols on the first frame, however Flash will pause as it loads them into memory (i.e. your movie will freeze as the cd spins up). This will ensure the rest of the movie plays smoothly, but depending on how large your movie is it may freeze older computers for so long your viewers believe the program has crashed (and in fact it may have crashed). So the options you need to weigh are shorter pauses as you load new things and the cd spins up, or one big pause at the beginning.

I would recommend testing the cd on an older computer and see how it performs. You may need to go back and optimize your files to smaller sizes so they wil play better on older hardware.