Featured Flash FLA 11358 Flash Movies | 4 New Flash Movies Added What's New | Top 100 Featured FLA » Author: Sean » Title: Customizable Flash Drop down menu » Description: The native source files for building a customizable menu roll down. » More by Sean Random FLAs | Add Flash Movie Featured Flash Site 5709 Flash Sites | 4 New Flash Links What's New | Top 100 Flash Site Featured Site » Posted in the Flash Kit Links section » Title: Sandy 3D Engine for Flash » Description: Sandy is a Flash 3D engine, available in 3 versions: AS2, AS3 and haXe Random Links | Add your own Flash Related Links

1302 Tutorials 7 New Tutorials Added! What's New | Top100 » MySpace profile flash slideshow » Display YouTube videos in self-customized Flash video player on website » How to make cool 3D flash banners for your website? » Make a Valentines Day Slideshow with Music » How to remove red eyes from a photo? » How to convert SWF to Animated GIF on Mac » How to Make a Platform Game using AS 2 - Part 1 » How to make a flash Greeting e-card » How to extract Youtube video to MP3 audio for Mac » Unknown Tag: Title10 Random Tutorial | Add Site

Web Manager University of Redlnads US-CA-Redlands Post A Job | Post A Resume

Tutorials Home What's New Top Rated Submit myTutes Random!

Tutorials » Actionscripting

Loading Sequence, Loading Animation or Preloader
Author: Bill Mackin | Website: http://www.billmackin.com |

Introduction

Flash's ability to load external content, allows smart designers to break-up large projects into several smaller pieces. This can drastically reduce load times, especially for visitors that only plan on viewing certain areas of your site. It can also make updating your site much easier, since you can now update individual sections or content without having to make changes to your whole site. Without a loading sequence though, many of your website visitors may believe your site is broken or not responding properly. Keeping your visitors accurately informed can be very important.

This tutorial attempts to provide you with an efficient, frame independent and easily re-useable loading sequence solution.

Step 1 - Getting Things Ready

In this step we will build all of the necessary items. Lets start with the loading bar, it is usually a rectangle and can be any size or color. Once you've drawn the rectangle, turn it into a movie clip by pressing F8 (Convert to symbol). Name the instance of your new movie clip "loadingbar" (no quotes). Next, create a dynamic text box on the stage and name its variable "_root.loadingtext" (again no quotes). Next, create an empty movie clip and place it on the stage. This is what we will be loading our external movie into. Name the instance of this movie clip "shell" (no quotes). Place this movie clip, where you want the top left of your external movie to be. Finally, create another empty movie clip and place it somewhere off the stage (I like to place mine slightly above the top left). This is where we will place all of our scripting.

» Forums
	More help? Search our boards for quick answers!

Please rate this tutorial, 10 is the top rating, you can also click the comments link to read/write a review.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1