macromedia flash sitedesign: [quoted text, click to view]

Scenes are the same as having one long timeline with everything on it.
Don't use that. It will stall the page. It's the old way of doing
things anyway. You need to divide things into movieclips and load
them one after the other while still letting the parts that have
finished loading work without waiting. Everything should keep loading
in the background. If someone clicks on a section that hasn't
finished loading yet, show the loading progress of that part while
it's loading. Get some preloader examples from tutorial sites (but
watch out for old versions and poorly written stuff)
There are some good ones here..
http://www.webwasp.co.uk/tutorials/preloaders/index.php
Your site has a very good look to it. I like it a lot.
tralfaz

My site is turning out pretty good, but it's 3.5 MB and it's not finished
yet.... It seems to take about 50 seconds on a cable modem to download which is
not going to work - every single person that comes to it will close it without
waiting.

Does anyone know how to break things apart so that sections download rather
than the whole thing? I haven't used the "scenes" option, I don't enough about
it, is that what I"m missing out on? I'd really like to have the front page
load, and then have a loading bar & percentage shown just to give people an
idea of how long it'll take. Right now, the screen stays blank until it's all
loaded which isn't goign to work...

Please take a look and let me know....and be aware that the site isn't
completed so a few things might look weird.

http://www.ekorastudios.com/v4/ - Click on "Flash"

Thanks in advance,
B. Eckert

[quoted text, click to view]

If you end up needing someone to look at it, strip it down to bare
essentials and zip it up.
(I don't have the latest Flash, so I can't work on it unless it is
version 6 or earlier anyway, but someone else can)

It's actually a bad idea to make such a big Flash file because Flash
has a history of suddenly corrupting a fla and making it unloadable.
Also, if you make your project in sections of different swfs it will
be easier to work on (less sluggish in the editor) when the fla file
is smaller.

[quoted text, click to view]

Sure. Movieclips that are built into the swf are going to load right
away if they are present on frame 1 or set to download on frame 1 (a
library option setting) It's a lot easier to control the loading
operations if you load the swfs externally with Actionscript. You can
load into a movieclip or a level. Once an external swf has loaded
once, the next time the visitor loads that section it will come from
their browser cache almost instantly.
You just need a preloading system that tracks which parts are loaded
and shows the loading progress.
tralfaz

Thank you for the compliment, I will check this link out.

I do have each section as a movie clip already...I would like to only load
each section as it's picked...for example: Someone comes to the site...the
front page loads. They enter, the home page loads. They choose portfolio,
that page loads. I would send you the source to look at, but it's like 95MB.

I basically have the timeline divided into 10 keyframes with the respective
movie clip in each. The menu is it's own movie clip that is on a seperate
level on the timeline that is constant throughout the whole timeline.

I guess I don't understand how to tell Flash to not load thse movie clips
unless selected. Does that make sense?

Thanks,
B. Eckert

Wow, this is starting to get over my head. Where can I learn more about these topics?

Thanks,

In addition, I guess I specifically need to know how to link external swfs into
the main swf. And how to position the external swf in the main swf file.

Can I do that with video files too? I have tons of video samples but I have
them all linked to a streaming windows media player file, but I would prefer to
use a premade screen right in the site. I haven't really attempted that
because I knew it would be way too big since each clip is well over 5, even 10
MB.

Thanks for any info,
B. Eckert