Program design help - suggestions?

[TheJazzMan]

I will try to keep this simple as possible. I was given the task of building a "step-by-step" training course in Flash. The course consists of about 20 different sections and will need a perpetual menu of some kind to jump to the different sections.

I'm thinking of building each section as it's own SWF file? I'm also thinking each step of the training should be a single frame in a Flash SWF file with some kind of interactivity, images, and audio.

How do other Flash developers build courses that have multiple sections? is there a recommended way of doing this?

Thanks.

JazzMan

[Noct]

Well, the right way for you would depend on what you are using to launch it, how it is going to be distributed, etc..

At the co. I work for, our CBTs are distributed on cd and the web, so we split everything up for faster loading. (People may not take the entire test every time, so it stands to reason to load it in sections.)
Also, my company is worldwide, so the content is created with the ability to easily change langauges. So all text content is saved in xml files, with none EVER in a swf.

The main interface has nothing in it but the background and navigation buttons. The content is all pulled in from xml and individual swfs at runtime.
There is a menu button that will give you a dynamically created list of every xml file in the directory. You can click on any node listed, and it will load the relevant content. So you do that first to select the "chapter" (xml page), then it loads the first swf listed in that xml.

Each page is stored in it's own swf, and called by the nav buttons to load/unload into a container clip.

[TheJazzMan]

Thanks Noct. Your suggestion was much appreciated. My delivery method will be like yours, both for CD and the web. Also my text will be in external files and formatted using CSS to get colored text and web page links. Greatly simplifies editing data if the text is external.

So you have a single SWF file that has nothing but a background and navigation buttons, correct? Do your nav buttons go on TOP of or overlap the container movie clip or are they located where nothing can cover them up? I'm wondering if I can somehow have my nav buttons always on top of any other content (the move clip container)?

Thanks for the insight. =)

[Noct]

No problem, hope it helped.
We have a few other components we built that sit in there too, but for the most part, yes, just the interface is in the main file. Our nav. buttons do overlap our content swf a bit, but we keep a set of guides in the template for the content swf to keep everything on track.

I have one further piece of advice, which for most people would be obvious, but wasn't for my boss apparently. Be sure to load each page into it's own container; It just makes working on it SO much easier. When we started, we had it so the main file loaded content swfs directly. It became an absolute nightmare to work with. You had to close and open the entire chapter, then surf back to your page, just to get that single page to refresh. Now we keep a button in the menu during production that will reset the current file you are looking at by removing it and reloading it into it's container.

[TheJazzMan]

Thanks again Noct. If your nav buttons in the main SWF file overlap the mc container, how do you always keep your nav buttons on top of the mc container?

I'm fairly new to Flash so the answer may be obvious, but if the main background is depth 1, the mc container depth 2, how do you keep the nav buttons from being covered up by the container?

Also, are you saying that each and every screen of a section is its own SWF file? I was thinking of having each section being a single SWF file but it sounds like you would have 30 SWF files if the section was 30 screens long.

Just wanted to make sure I understood this correctly.

Thanks again!

[Noct]

Yeah, I spoke too soon on that one I'm afraid. Upon closer inspection, our Nav buttons do not overlap the content, they flush perfectly against the bottom of it. You'd have to see the file to see why I thought it did, but regardless. You could always just keep the nav buttons in thier own seperate little swfs and load them over the content.

As far as the sections, it plays out like this:

AS pulls the xml in to populate the main chapter menu.
When you open the app, you are presented with that menu.
Each section (chapter) of the menu is a seperate xml file.
Each xml file contains multiple (child)nodes that hold the data for each page of content. (Text content, swf file, coordinates, etc..)
When you click a nav button, it unloads the current child node of your current xml file, and gets the next one.
When it reaches the last node of one xml file, it changes you to the next chapter, and node.

So, yeah, you would get as many swfs as you have content pages. Ours are usually in the thousands for each CBT. Of course, if you are doing all the work yourself you would have more freedom there. One of the main reasons they keep everything split where I work is that we have more then one developer. If every chapter was one swf, only one guy could work on a chapter at a time.