intro and skip intro option

[Taldos]

hey got a question. am doing my first intro sequence and after three days am finished with it, now my problem is that i am wondering how exactly the previous sequence of events happen.

do i have a preloader to makes sure that teh intro has be fully loaded and then begin playing. or a preloader which makes sure that both the preloader and the main page to which it goes after have been loaded.

this would eliminate have the problem of having a preloader before main page, whoever it would take up a lot of spce.

second option:
have a preloader which once the intro has loaded begins the animation. letting the main page load up while the animation is playing. not a very reliable option.

i guess what i am asking is what is the general placement of intros in perspective to the main page which follows. R they loaded in empty movie clips from completly different swf files? someone help me out here.

i guess i have to have a preloader before the main page so that if someone decides to skip the intro there is a preloder which makes sure the main page has loaded before displaying it.

well either way let me know if this makes sense.

thanx abd be well

[Jesse]

I think you should keep your main page and intro in the same file. preloader too. in this order;
preloader - intro - main page
Then you need to generate a size report and calculate approx how many seconds the main page will take to load on a 36kBps modem (no slower, say 3kB per second). Then check this time against your intro length. If you're left with say, 5 seconds over, you will need to load 15kB ( 3kBps * 5 seconds) from the main page as well, in the preloader. This is the smartest way to do it in my opinion. Preloaders weren't made to buffer 3Mb files but lots of people abuse them in that way. They should simply buffer enough such that your application can stream nicely. No more than 8 seconds worth of preloading was a rule I read somewhere and agree with.
Finally, if you're using a bar preloader you wont be able to use getbytesTotal() because you don't want to check the total bytes, so (using your generated size report) work out how many bytes in the frames you wish to preload and compare the loaded bytes against that. Or alternatively just use ifFrameLoaded which is easier.

[KarenInPA]

Hello,

I'd like to offer some additional thoughts.

I think the whole issue of main page loaded first vs. intro loaded first kind of depends on the file sizes. If the main page is small, say 30k, could it make sense to load that up before the intro?

The reason I say that is because when a visitor clicks "skip intro", they usually mean what they say. I could envision a user becoming ticked if they choose to skip over one preloader, only to be faced with another. Perhaps it may be better in some situations to ensure the visitor has zero wait when choosing not to view the intro.

I don't disagree with anything Jesse posted, I only wanted to point out another idea.

Thanks,
Karen

[Taldos]

my only concern with putting the intro along with teh main page into the same page is the issue of refreshing the page(via the browser) if the user does this, and the intro is withint he same page as the main page, would the act of refreshing send the user back to the intro instead of simply refreshing the main page....

hmmm i guess i could just have counter after the intro is viewed which would make the intro only seen once. but then again what would happen if the user decided to refresh the page. hmm. okay. did not think of the idea of the user having to go through two preloaders, as that is what i was using. good point. if the intro are int the same page as the main page, than that makes sense. but if you loading an external swf, i wonder.


of course i could just load the serparate swf into an emptpy MC an make it visible = 0; until i need it, but that would mean i have extra naimation going on when i dont need it. sorry for venting. this is just a good place in which ideas flow.
thanx againg for your help and i hope that i have not imposed to much

thanx and be well

[Ricod]

U could use a cookie for that. Just place a variable in it and check it on the first frame.

[Taldos]

sorry don't know how to do program cookies. and one more thing about testing if the user has the flash plugin do i need to programm a cookie for that as well. as it would seem to me that i can't put in the little bit of code which everyone has in the first frmae to get the current version of Flash that the user has.

for example if I publish a page fron flash in html with the code which getst the latest version. can i use that as my index page. once again i don't see how if i program flash to detect whether a user has the plug in how it will work if the user doesn't have flash. aaah this is frustrating to suffer throug all the work of making a web page work and the stupid publishing offereing you more trouble. aaaahhhh

thanx and be well:(

[Taldos]

nm figured it out, thanks for you help