How does flash actually deal with loading dynamic content?

[lobe]

Hello, I have a question about how flash deals with loading things. As I understand it there are a number of different ways to bring dynamic content into flash, but try as I might I can't seem to have two things going on at once. I have a project on CD Rom, it's quite big so I switch between areas by loading swfs (with loadMovieNum) - I load them into level 1 so whenever a user clicks on a new section it replaces the swf that was previously there. It's all dandy, but they take a bit of time to load, being several megs each. What I've noticed however is that whenever I load an swf in it freezes the whole program while this happens - so say if I had another movie playing on a layer above with an animation, this freezes while the swf below is replaced. I think it's a bit odd that flash is acting this way, and I'm wondering if there is a way to both load and play content at the same time. I'm not using movieclips here, could that have anything to do with it?

[Gibberish]

your code has to be part of your design. There are hundreds of ways to make differnet things happen. Each way is harder or easier on the CPU. So say you are loading huge swf and having 4 others animate at the same time. You would want the code for all the swfs to be as little CPU intesive as possible so not to slow everything down. A lot of random motion and fading will hurt your presentation.

Since you psoted no sample fla or code I would just assume you coded in a way that is CPU intensive and with the loading of the new few mb swf just adds on to that and overloads.

[Xeef]

hi

not sure about this but most of the programs i have stop working as long they acesing the TOC of a CD not just flash
if i think on it all programs i know stop respondng till the cd is spined up
so i think this is a basic problem from Windows and not from flash

[lobe]

Hi, thanks for the replies. The code I am using is very simple, perhaps that's the problem all it does is load the movie into the level I specify (eg: loadMovieNum ("movie1.swf", 1); ). Ultimately what I was trying to do was make an animated loading screen - just something ultra simple. At present when you switch between sections on the cd rom, the swf that is currently on level 1 is sent to a frame which says "loading" this sits there while the new swf loads in its place. My aim was that when a user switched sections two things would happen - a loading animation would load on level 2 and loop until the movie on level 1 had loaded - on the first frame of the level 1 movie would be an unloadMovie command to get rid of the one on level 2. But what seems to happen is that the movie that loads on level 1 overrides everything else, the loading level just freezes and eventually disappears when the level 1 movie has loaded. I'm code crippled, so it's no doubt inefficiently designed - but surely there's a way to get an animated loading screen on a cd rom...