Codezwiz >> Forums >> Flash Help >> Flash preloading

Hi guys,

I'm having yet another problem. Whatever I do I can't seem to make a preloader work on my flash intro. If you go to [ Register or login to view links on this board.] you'll see there's a flash intro that takes a while to load. I've looked at a bunch of tutorials and everything but am unable to get a flash preloader to work. If anybody can tell me why or can help me out I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

See what you mean, it does take a while.

Preloaders can work in several ways, but the easiest is probably to check to see if a certain frame is loaded before starting to play the main movie. the frame to check needn't be the last one, as a certain amount of loading can continue while the movie is playing.

So if your movie has 500 frames, it may be ok to start playing when, say frame 250 has loaded. To do that, you only need a couple of keyframes of instructions.

Make sure the main movie starts at, for example, frame 10. Between frames 1 to 9, you can put your preloding animation or text.
At frame one, add an action that says;

If Frame Is Loaded (250)
Go to and Play(10)
End Frame Loaded

At frame 9 add the action;

Go to and Play (1)

This will loop the preload animation frames (1-9) until frame 250 has loaded, then it will release the movie to play at the start of the main animation at frame 10.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

I did what you told me to do and it still doesn't seem to work. For frame 1 I put:

ifFrameLoaded (178) {
}
gotoAndPlay(10);

And for frame 9 I put:

gotoAndPlay(1);

I applied this to all of the layers. If there are any other suggestions please let me know. Thanks!

You only need apply it to one layer. What version of Flash are you using?

Flash MX 2004

Try this for frame 1...

ifFrameLoaded (250) {
gotoAndPlay (10);
}

for frame 9...

gotoAndPlay(1);

You would put your pre-loader animation between frames 1-9

Another way of doing it is to determine the total number of bytes and then start the animation once a certain number of bytes have been loaded.

Hi,

Thanks, that worked out perfectly! But now I want to add a movie clip during the preload. This is the error it gives me:

Statement must appear within on/onClipEvent handler
ifFrameLoaded (250) {

Thanks for your help!