do I have to break apart my swf?

[berilac]

Hi,

 

I have built/almost completed a website (around 3.5MB currently) - and would like to construct a sensible preloader for it.

 

However, as I have been learning both AS3 and greensock code throughout this project, I decided not to read up on loaders until now (perhaps not the greatest idea, but I had to start somehwere ).

 

The site is all within a single movie clip on frame 2 of the main flash ide stage.

Within that mc I have everything on frame 1. All my site "pages" are single mc's containing all their necessary sub mc's.

 

I would like my preloader to first load the home page, and display pretty much immediately; then in the back ground, keep loading the other "page" mc's; but should a user click on of the nav menu links, to prioritise the load of that "page" over the others...etc.

 

In order to achieve this, must I break apart those "page" mc's in to separate .swf's???

This is the impression I'm getting from what I'm reading (apart from selfLoader - am reading currently).

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers

[Zync]

Hi Berilac,

 

Yeah typically in site design you want to have all your pages separate as you should think about the end user. They probably don't want to load the entire site in 1 shot, not only would it be slow on some connections but there may only be some specific pages that they want to see. By having a loader for each page you give the user a choice as to weather or not to download that page. You can either make self loaders in each page, or what most people do is build a loader function in the main 'shell' or 'holder' page of your site that loads the separate pages into a movie clip container. GAIA btw is a great framework that guides you with building multipage flash websites both quickly and easily and best of all uses the Greensock library. I don't have any examples at the moment but I'm working on a GAIA + Greensock tutorial series showing how how build a complete site with the GAIA framework + using loaderMax and TweenMax for various elements. Should be out soon.

[berilac]

Thank you, Zync. Much appreciated.

 

I thought it would come to this.

 

So am I right in saying then, that I need to take each of my "page" mc's (with all their nested content) and resave them as separate swf's?

 

Furthermore, each page has a background image, and various other images, etc that are currently within the flash ide library.

Would it be better to use loaders to load all of this content as well?

Or would it be enough to split up the pages as mentioned above, and just load each complete page, as necessary?

 

Thanks again (will read up on GAIA) and looking forward to your tutorials

[edit] : though looking at it, would it not be too much of a pain to start using GAIA now, as I've already basically built my website? I'm already slightly concerned how much of my code is going to "break" simply by splitting up the pages into separate swf's...

 

Peace

[Carl]

Furthermore, each page has a background image, and various other images, etc that are currently within the flash ide library.

Would it be better to use loaders to load all of this content as well?

 

I would say start small and just get each page as a swf to work. although possible, it is a much greater undertaking to load things that are loading things.

 

if each page is around 300kb each page should load pretty quick for anyone with a broadband connection.

 

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Zync, looking forward to your tutorial. I haven't touched gaia myself but think having a reference / starting point with loaderMax integration would be awesome.

 

Carl