Need to understand load movie

[dave evans]

Hi i'm working on a projector and i would like to get to grips with the load movie operation and how the levels work, at the moment i am just using this script as a frame action and it seems to work,

loadMovieNum ("Video1.swf", 0);
This seems to call the .swf into my projector


loadMovieNum ("Video2.swf", 0);
unloadMovie ("Video1.swf");
This seems to work also, on the last frame of Video1.swf the above script loads a new movie and unloads the old my .swf's are in the same root directory as the projector and all seems well, what i dont understand is where the levels come into things,and i would like to understand this so if anyone has any info on good Tutorials on this it would be great, just to get my head around Levels and Target ect, TIA Dave.

[Pheonyx]

The levels are just what they say....what level the movie loads on. Just like layers. The main movie is always level 1 (or 0 I can't remember ;) ) The layer number determins what goes on top of what. For instance, a movie in level 3 would cover up a movie in level 1. Just like a graphic in layer 3 would cover up a graphic in layer 1 (given that the layer 3 was above layer 1 of course) Hope that helps...hope I'm right too :D

[dave evans]

Thankyou for the explanation, so i geuss loding and unloading directly from the root of the cd in this case is ok however if it was a web based presentation it would be better to load the movies into the various levels with say a blank keyframe at the start and play them as required (so they are sitting there loaded and ready to play) would this be correct, regards Dave.

[Pheonyx]

now you got it ;)

or better yet, for web applications, don't load them all at the beginning, just load them when needed so the initial loading time isn't too long.

[Jesse]

PS - loading into empty MCs on the _root level is always the best way to go in my opinion. it allows for dynamic targetting (when you get to being a higher end scripter) and makes for easier manipulation of content.

[Pheonyx]

wouldn't that make for more complicated scripting? Or is that not even a factor?

[Jesse]

It's really a matter of personal opinion but I find that loading into MCs makes for easier manipulation of visual objects and makes for easier scripting. for instance, you can dynamically reference MC paths but dynamically constructing a level path is more ugly...

[Pheonyx]

ah ;) good thinkin....