Multiple Movie Clips (external swf's) background loading??

[ttadder]

I've been reading all the threads on preloaders, I got that concept, and I am a newbie to the actionscript releam, but understand a fair about. I do have a very special case that maybe some of you will be able to help with.

I am a photographer and I am built my own basic site, which is of course heavy because of the image content.

I have multiple sections that I built with seperate swf files and used loadMovie to bring them into a main.swf. That seemed to work okay but, each swf had its own preloader which made navigating the site lame. (you had to watch the little bar grow every time you moved sections.)

So I mushed the MC all into the main, but now my swf is 1.7mb, far to big!!!

reffering to my site http://www.timtadder.com

So what I've been trying to figure out for the past 7 hours is how to load maybe the first section (portraits) and while my user might be in that section load additional swf's in the background. that's one problem.

The next problem is what if my user decides to go to moments, before portraits. moments will not be loaded, and will need to be.

I'd like to find a way to load the movies in the background while the user enters the site and begins to cruise around,

Since the loadmovie command brings them in on levels, if I bring them in the overlap....

I'm really confused....

Please help....

[ttadder]

Is anyone out there that can help? I'm going nuts:

confused:

[webguy]

Well you already told us the answer to your problem.

which is of course heavy because of the image content

You need to keep you photography stuff outside of your swf. Load those in on demand. People don't want to wait for information, but they can expect to wait for portfolio content.

Since you already know about preloaders, adapt one to load your images.

As for loading one section and loading in the background other sections, yes that is possible. Using a preloader, have it advance once a frame has been loaded. Unfortunately like you said, if they try to jump ahead before the section is downloaded they will be presented with nothing. Therein lies your catch 22. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

What most of us do is include important content in the mainMovie so that is downloaded at startup. Anything 'heavy' is left out and is downloaded on demand. Just make an entertaining preloader and you will have no worries.

webG

[ttadder]

thanks so much for your reply, how big is too big for your main swf to be? each of my sectional swf is about 500k, so when the user goes fro spot to spot they have to wiat each time to load, it gets very lame watching over and over the little bar grow...

is there a way to

1. keep the content in a cache so that once it loads it stays loaded but not visiable? I am loading all sectional swfs into level1 thus they replace each other when called. am i doing this wrong?

2. what is the best way to provide image content and to keep file size down?

[webguy]

you did mean to type 500k right? My entire website is only a bit over 300k. All of those are loaded seperately. My opening is 72k.

.2 is the question you really need to answer. And that answer is Compression. You need to compress those images down using photoshop or a similar image editing program. Colorful images, (utilizing many colors 64+) should always be of jpg format. Low color images should be gif format. Either way requiring transparency should be png format. (though you want to test both gif and png as I find sometimes gif beats png out).

check out this site for some helpful tutorials.

http://css2.mcad.edu/help/photoshop7/help.html

webG