Recommended size for .SWF on website???

[Woodsy01]

Hi there,

I'm producing an interactive video piece for my New Media masters project. I've put it up on my website, and was wondering out of curiousity, whats the recommended upper limit for the size of a .SWF file on the internet to run smoothly? I realise CPU and internet speeds vary greatly from machine to machine along with RAM, but is there a general upper limit which shouldn't be exceeded for .SWFs?

My project's .SWF is currently at 260kb. It also pulls in .FLVs that are between 800kb - 1.5mb and .mp3s between 1.5mb - 2mb via XML.

The latest prototype of my project is at www.keithwoods.co.uk (http://www.keithwoods.co.uk) if anyone's interested and would like to leave me some feedback on this post on how smoothly it ran on your particular machine and any other comments welcome.

Cheers!

[Woodsy01]

Hi there,

I'm producing an interactive video piece for my New Media masters project. I've put it up on my website, and was wondering out of curiousity, whats the recommended upper limit for the size of a .SWF file on the internet to run smoothly? I realise CPU and internet speeds vary greatly from machine to machine along with RAM, but is there a general upper limit which shouldn't be exceeded for .SWFs?

My project's .SWF is currently at 260kb. It also pulls in .FLVs that are between 800kb - 1.5mb and .mp3s between 1.5mb - 2mb via XML.

The latest prototype of my project is at www.keithwoods.co.uk (http://www.keithwoods.co.uk) if anyone's interested and would like to leave me some feedback on this post on how smoothly it ran on your particular machine and any other comments welcome.

Cheers!

[mca_kkchaitanya]

while publishing the SWF set the options so that the swf size will be reduced

-debug=false

if use RSL the size of the swf will be reduced

google -> swf size + reduction

[dplows]

That site messed with my head.....so confused

[henke37]

You are more than under the limit. Don't worry.

[TomMalufe]

I think the size of the files are fine. I would try and keep the main SWF size as low as possible (less then a MB is good, but much smaller is best) and then I preload things that I need only when I'm going to need them.
For example, if the site has a bunch of sections, then I would load each section as the user goes to it. This will be faster for the user to load smaller amounts of content at a time and not touching on the content that possibly may never be seen.

Your site looks cool by the way. At first I thought I was at the wrong place because, surely, what I saw was not a flash site. But, then I read what was there and realized what you had done. Very clever.

Your audio player could use some error handling. I tried to go to the next song and started getting errors:
Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error.
at MusicPlayer/playSong()
at MusicPlayer/onNext()

and some others when I paused and then played again, but that was clearly from trying to play a sound stream that didn't exist.

A lot of your MovieClips (not the color guy videos) whould be gray, then dark when moused over, then completely disapear when I mouse out. That seemed buggy to me, the mouse over transitions.

Otherwise, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do or see other then some floaty balls that turn into color guys.
Transitions when adding or removing a color guy was a little weird too. They would all vanish for a second and then all would come back except for the one I was removing.

[-Ev-]

Performance (aside from loading time) has little to do with the overall size of the SWF file. It is much more affected by how much you're trying to display, animate and process at a given moment. As Tom said just in general, the smaller you can keep it, the better. However this is out of concern for load times and delivering content as quickly as possible to the user, and for not wasting bandwidth on content the user doesn't choose to see.

[Woodsy01]

Thanks for your comments guys, really hepful.

dplows, out of curiousity when you said the site messed with your head was that in a good, trippy, interesting sort of a way or did you think 'what the hell is this all about?!' then leave? Criticisms more than welcome.

Thanks Tom for your detailed review...I still need to cover Error Event handling. I am currently using an event listener for the XML Music Player using IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, although currently the function it calls just holds a trace statement...so obviously not very helpful for anyone excpet me! I'll look into putting in a flashing 'Song Loading' message or something.

As for the buggy transitions, not quite sure what's going on with that? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's meant to start with the Music Player (bottom left) and Ying Yang symbol (top right) flashing on the screen so the user is aware of them, then they're meant to tween to an alpha of 0, but sometimes they get stuck somewhere between alpha 1 and 0?

Video transitions are also not perfect as I'm still learning Flash/AS3 but basically they work on a long list of if/else if statements...15 in total.....so if blue is on stage, then red is added....the code jumps to the if statement which tells the FLV component to play the correct video depending on which other characters on stage. Its this jump between the if statements which causes the videos to disappear momentarily.....not too sure how I can make that work a bit more smoothly?

Anyway, thanks guys and if you've got any other comments please post them up.