Multiple Preloaders for Multiple Movie Clips

Question

Designed in Flash 8, the site's timeline is all in Scene 1
and is comprised of an introduction, which contains a short video,
and 6 movie clip categories that the user selects to view. Since I
want the intro to play as soon as possible, I'd like to limit the
first preloader to just the video in the intro and not
_root.getBytesTotal. Then, as the viewer watches this short video,
the rest of Scene 1 movie clips will keep on loading. After the
intro, the viewer will choose which of the 6 categories to view.
These categories are identified with buttons which play the
particular movie clip. Since I don't know the order of the
categories they will select, I thought there should be a separate
preloader for each category. Hopefully, after they view a category,
the rest of the categories will have loaded and the loading time
will be nil. The design for the preloader is comprised of a status
bar and a percent loaded. Is there a way to limit the
_root.GetBytesTotal to specific frames? I know I could break these
categories up into separate SWF files but then I loose the
advantage of one loading while another is being viewed.

Answer 1

MovieClipLoader is a built in class of functions that will
allows you to easily load Media (swfs/jpgs) from external sources.
This will create a MCL object
var mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader
We want the MCL object to receive events for any movie that
is loaded into the main timeline
mcl.addListener(this);
Ok. now we have a movie clip loader that is able to recieve
events. Since we want to show the progressive download and want to
do something with that content after it loads, we need to declare
two event handlers onLoadProgress and onLoadInit. onLoadProgress is
pretty straight forward. onLoadInit executes it's action as soon
all of the AS on frame 1 of its time has finished loading. In this
case, we want two different things to happen. 1st, load the first
clip and show it.... 2nd, load all remaining clips into the buffer.
But first, lets declare those next...
function onLoadProgress( target:MovieClip,
bytesLoaded:Number, bytesTotal:Number):Void {
// standard preloader code goes here
function onLoadInit( target:MovieClip ):Void {
// display the clip - this will be as easy as just calling
our loadClip function for the mcl...more on that in a minute
// If you want something special to happen, i.e. movie fades
in or a mask is applied to it, you'd do that here.
Now all we need to do is call the loadClip member function
for the MovieClipLoader. Just replace the two parameters with the
location of the swf and then the name of the instance you want it
to load into
mcl.loadClip( "myswf.swf", targetMovieClip );
The other movie clips are now a breeze as well. For each
button, just add an on(release) or onRelease = function (depending
on your situation) to just call that mcl.loadClip() line from up
above. Just change the movie you want loaded.
Let me know if you need more help...