Preloader help, please!

[jenbeast]

I have these HUGE jpegs in these flash movies which appear in pop-up windows upon clicking a button. I made a pre-loader for each in it's own "scene". The preloader plays, but then dissappears and leaves a big, blank window for a moment before the jpeg image appears. I am pulling my hair out and can't figure WHY it would do this-I am using a simple actionscript:

ifFrameLoaded ("Photos", 4) {
}
gotoAndPlay("Photos", 1);

And Flash MX.

View current state of my nightmare at:
http://www.piperferguson.com/test/

Thanks for any help!

[t-omen]

Originally posted by jenbeast
ifFrameLoaded ("Photos", 4) {
}
gotoAndPlay("Photos", 1);

And Flash MX.

View current state of my nightmare at:
http://www.piperferguson.com/test/

Thanks for any help!

Seems that the loading is not completed at 100%. So what does this 100% stand for? I mean from what is it counted from?

And another thing:
ifFrameLoaded ("Photos", 4) {
}
gotoAndPlay("Photos", 1);
???

Best thing is to make absolutely sure, your movie is loaded and only then proceed. It drowe me nuts to figure it out, too, but once you get there you'll see it...

Check my preloader for reference, maybe it'll help...

[jenbeast]

Well, thank you very much for your reply! I will check out your preloader.

Are you confused about the preloader script I used? Does it not make sense? I thought I was telling it to make sure up to frame 4 is loaded before playing the movie starting at frame one. What may be confusing is that I have put the preloader in a separate "scene" from the main movie because the scrolling picture script does not work when I start it on a later frame-I downloaded the script from flashkit and it's fairly self-explanatory but I couldn't get it to work any other way. Many preloaders I've tried don't seem to work when I try to input the "scene" into the gotoAndPlay instruction. Welcome to my nightmare. I'll post my progress. The client wanted me to push the site "live" anyway, so it's here now:
http://www.piperferguson.com

Thanks again!

[cobo]

it´s a nightmare to use scenes...

never, never and i mean never, use scences...
there are better ways to do what you want...

use getBytesLoaded and getBytesTotal instead of ifFramesLoaded...

please post your fla...

cobo

[cobo]

another question...

why did u use pop-up´s instead of displaying the jpg´s on your main site...?!?

cobo

[jenbeast]

Ok, ok! Thanks for diving into this cobo! I posted the .fla of one of the smaller scrolling-photo-pop-up windows here:

http://www.piperferguson.com/test/newyork.fla

Because it's one of the smaller ones, the pre-loader issue may not be as obvious, but it's still there.

Lately I've been asking myself the same question about why I used pop-ups and have been thinking about losing them. I think when I originally made the site, I was just doing the only stuff I could get Flash to do at the time. I'm still a beginner, but I think I could handle losing the pop-ups now. Now that I think of it, I could probably come up with a far more efficient way to display those images in the main page, sigh, it never ends.

You're my hero if you can make some sense out of this pre-loader mess! Why do scenes suck so much? Why even include that feature in the program if it sucks balls? Does Flash have a lot of bugs or what? Wazzup, geez.

Thanks so much, again!

[cobo]

hang on... got some project to finish at the moment... will be back soon...

cobo

[jenbeast]

ok - me, too

[cobo]

hi,
sorry for the delay...

i´ve finished a completely dynamic jpg loader and will publish it within the next days at the movies section.

with this script you´re able to load either jpg´s or swf´s directly into your main movie.

stay tuned
cobo

[jenbeast]

I can't wait. I've been busy on another project, too. I've had a little more success with the preloaders with this one. In fact I'm working hard to push it live tonight! I'd love if you'd take a look at it and will post the link when I'm done. Thanks again for your help!

[cobo]

here´s the loader...

jpg loader (http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=999)

enjoy

[jenbeast]

Aw, man, that "download .fla" button took me to a 404 error page. Whazzup?

[cobo]

hmmm... strange... i will report this to jesse...

:confused:

[gitoweaver]

jenbeast, I really like your site! I have a question though, is it really difficult to build the slide photo show that you have created? I like the one from artist button....thanks

[jenbeast]

Thanks! No, well it wasn't difficult for ME because I got that slideshow from Flashkit when I first started using Flash. If you go to Flashkit.com and search for "photoscroller" you'll find it right away. It's by a guy named Barry Driessen, and it looks like he made a second, updated one, even.

[jenbeast]

Here's a link to the new Flash site I finished recently:
http://www.thedistortions.com/

I know this is a Flash forum, but if anyone knows what causes the big white "flashes" before each section loads in the html section of the site I'm all ears!

[t-omen]

Change the background to black. Does it still "flash"? <body bgcolor=#000000>

[jenbeast]

Oh, geez, have you looked at the source code? I have set the background of everything I could to black. I've tried css, frames, no frames, layers, you name it. I've tried looking at other html sites to see if I can figure it out but no luck yet. It's really annoying, and might be just the size of the contents on each page? But no, even the "Bio" and "News" pages do it, and there's almost nothing on either of those yet. I'm perplexed. Thanks for asking :-)

[t-omen]

There is no background color defined, and that means it is set to white. That causes the "flash".

Here is what I get if download your html/index.html with wget:

<html>
<head>
<title>th E__Di sT o rT iO Ns</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<frameset rows="100%,*" frameborder="NO" border="0" framespacing="0">
<frame src="indexF.html" name="mainFrame">
<frame src="zeroframe.html" name="zeroframe" scrolling="NO" noresize>
</frameset>
<noframes><body>
</body></noframes>
</html>


Right?

the indexF.html and zeroframe.html seems to be ok, though...

[jenbeast]

Oh! Actually, I did put a bg tag in there but I guess I never uploaded it, cause probably didn't work when I tested it locally. But anyway, I thought I was being crazy because I didn't think you could put a bgcolor tag in a frameset. Where exactly is it supposed to go? Well, I'm gonna put one on every line and see what happens. I'll report my results!

[jenbeast]

OK, it didn't work. The pages still flash all white at least until it seems everything is in the cache, and even after that it still might do it, it's unbelievable-it should be so simple!
This is what I did:
<frameset rows="100%,*" frameborder="NO" border="0" framespacing="0" frame bgcolor="#000000">
<frame src="indexF.html" name="mainFrame" bgcolor="#000000">
<frame src="zeroframe.html" name="zeroframe" scrolling="NO" noresize bgcolor="#000000">
</frameset>
<noframes><body bgcolor="#000000">
</body></noframes>
</html>

Where am I going wrong??!! My web-design career is finished!!Boohoohoohoo :(

*sniff*

[t-omen]

Well, to be honest, your code does not pass any validations... So, before it is valid, it really is impossible to tell what does what with your site; eg. the site looks fine if viewed with Mozilla's Firefox (only upon entering does it flash, not thereafter), and does the flash e-v-e-r-y time if viewed with IE... (might be just that the browsers handle instances differently...)

Also there is the issue with frames - can you lose them? I think your site could very well work without them (and, at least it would give people the change to bookmark directly, say, "NEWS" - now all they can bookmark is the index.html). I think frames in general should not be used, and it would be a lot easier to debug the site if there were no frames. If you like to keep 'em, just view the pages without frames - see if they "flash"...

[jenbeast]

Well, since you asked-I'll tell you--
I agree about using frames-along with pop-up windows I prefer to leave them out. The current frameset/layer/within frameset condition of the site is the culmination of my trying to get it to work correctly in IE, the browser the owner of the site uses (<:-0). It was a unique problem initially in html because he wanted all the pages to load in the TV. My first solution was simply using tables and "re-drawing" the TV for each page. The music page, however, must be a frameset because the best way I found to play the music is to load mp3s via .swfs into the "zeroframe". Then I thought that was why the "white-flash" was happening. I wondered if putting the "zeroframe" in a different part of the page would fix it, and the madness continued from there! Sigh, I don't think anything I did made one bit of difference, and eventually I think I will put the site back the way it was, thanks again, t-omen!