Where should I place my preloaders?

Question

Hi all,
Would like to seek advice on where should I place the
preloaders.
I have a banner swf, menu swf, main content swf, and intro
swf. where should i load the preloader? on the main MC that will be
calling these swf? or each swf have their own preloader? that would
look rather weird.
Of should I just merged banner, menu, main content and intro
altogether? How do i do that? I am lost as to should I separate
them out or put all eggs in 1 nest. My main content will have
transitions between each sections.
since my menu is separate from the main content, how do I
point them to get the main content to change section whenever user
click on 1 sections?
I am so lost. Please advise. Thanks

Answer 1

Hey X, sorry I haven't responded of late, working elsewhere.
Let me address some of the questions you've had above.
1) I'm very sorry, I see that I missed that assignment when I
typed this out, within the loadFile function the correct call
should be: mcl.loadClip(src, clip);
2)the code is AS2, and yes it is legal coding. first, we're
setting up parameters for our function here, and then we pass them
this information when we call the method that we've set up, so that
we can 'feed' information to the function that then uses it to
perform it's job. the variable declarations in this case here are
called 'strict typing' (ie. src:String, file:String, ...) and it's
just a way to define variables of a particular 'type', it isn't
necessary to follow the variable names with the type declaration,
but I thought that I would include it here so that it made sense to
you and so that you could see what type of variables need to be
passed to the function. the varaibles MUST be passed to the
function in the order that they are listed.
3) yes you've got this all right :) The onLoadInit handler
fires when the loaded clip becomes instantiated on the timeline
(eg. available), previous to this point you could NOT say something
like 'clip.gotoAndPlay(10);' because the loading clip was not yet
available for the call, and it would fail. So you can use this
handler to tell the loaded clip to 'do something' if you need this
type of functionality, like say for instance that you need the
loaded swf to go to a certain 'page' depending on what button the
user pressed, this handler would be a way for you to pass that
informtion along, and tell the loaded clip to goto the correct
position, handy ;)
As to the last question in 3, I touched on that above, my bad
4) I was just talking about the name of the swf file being
called 'dummy'.
5) No, put everything in frame one, but on a different
layers. Place your preloader on the top layer, and the 'blank' MCs
(to load into) on layers below.
OK, on to your last post.
Yes, the way it's set up here the preload bar would run to
100% for each load and then start again for the next one, it also
has a text instance that tells the use what is being loaded each
time. This could all be changed, and you can certainly use you own
preloader instance, however you will need to reconstruct the method
that is handling the progress. See if you wanted ALL of the
instance your loading to equal 100% of your loader bars progress
(for the first load anyway) you can't calculate the total bytes of
all files previous to initiating the load, so you have a problem
here. One method might be to 'break up' the load and apportion the
progress indicator evenly for each item needed in the intital site
loading. what I mean by that is, if you have 4 items that are
needed to load, then each item would 'move' the progress bar by
25%, so that when 100% of the first item is loaded, the progress
bar is revealed by 25%, then the second load reveals 50%, and so
on. It will just take a little math to change the code to handle
the progressions. Now I would suggest that you NOT animate the
masking rectangle by frames, I would do this with code adjusting
the _x position of the mask by an amount that has been calculated
with the loading code. also this method will have to accomidate,
both multi-loads and singlular loads so you'll need to use another
parameter to define how the preload indicator progress is 'broken'
and into how many parts. This would end up in the math that defines
the system that controls the indicator.
OK this should be enough for you to think about for now
:)