East Yet Advanced Preloader - Page 2

Getting Started

The first thing I always do when making a preloader is to create the preloader it's very own scene (makes things less confusing, etc but you can make it in the main scene if you wish).

Add a new scene to your movie by going Modify -<%gt%> Scene and then clicking on the little "plus" picture. Now go to the new scene.

You might wanna set up a few objects right now, to get them out of the way. We will set up the loading bar, and a percent text box. The loading bar is just an animation that takes up EXACTLY 100 frames. i usually just make this a bar with a shape tweened mask over it, as in the picture; but you may do anything you wish.

Draw a bar on your canvas, select it, and press F8 to convert it into a symbol. Edit this new symbol so that it is an animation of 100 frames; no more, no less.

One way of doing this is to create another layer over top of the bar. On the layer with the bar, select frame 100 and press F5. On the layer above it (frame 1), draw a tiny box that barely covers on edge then on frame 100 press F6 and make the box longer, so it just covers the box underneath it. Now on this new layer somewhere, click on any frame and go to the properties box. In here, select Shape Tweening from the drop-down menu. Now make the top layer a mask, to create a growing bar!

Now that you have acomplished this, go back to your preloader scene, and create a new textbox. Make it a dynamic textbox, and give it the variable of: percentLoadedText making sure it is big enough. While you are here, you might as well give the bar an instance name. Simply call it "bar"

Easy as pie. Now for the Actionscipt!