preloader bar

[digitanimation]

I just can't get a preloader to work. I have two situations where I need help. One is a simple preloader. I have lots of reference material (books) etc.
But no matter what method I try my main movie doesn't play frame 1 until the entire swf is loaded.

So, since frame one won't play the preloader is of no use. I have only a super simple preloader on frame one. When I use the Bandwidth profiler I can see that it stays on frame 0 while percent goes up to 96% before anything happens.

The second situation is when loading .swfs from disk into a main .swf. I have a load bar that freezes until the swfs are fully loaded. Then it blinks once and plays the loaded swf.

Help.

[Jarno]

here to you example from simple preloader made with two frames.
http://www.huittinen.com/~jarno/fla/preloader.zip
_________
Jarno

[farafiro]

Tutorials (http://www.actionscript.org/tutorials.shtml) section here

[digitanimation]

A simple related question.

Does every swf play the first frame of itself automatically? Or are there types of loads/bad programming that will prevent the first frame from playing?

Why is my test loading all before it plays frame one?

[farafiro]

there might be several reasons for that, post your first frame's code here

[digitanimation]

farafiro,
Thanks for your help and offer of more help. I think I've got it.
I'm fairly new so the inside information about how Flash works is unknown to me.
It seems that I have had two problems. One is having sounds that are instantiated upon first frame and the other is having QT movies in the first frame. (In the QTs case I was trying to do a load bar from inside the receiving .swf and the QT was on the first frame of the loading swf so it had to load the entire QT before it could play the first frame) or something like that.

I have both instances working now that I understand what it takes to get Flash to play the first frame quickly.