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 Tutorials » Utilities
Setting a maximum loader play rateI worked out that I needed to control the rate of playback of the loader after I had built one. If the movie had already been loaded, the loader would give an annoying flash before the content appeared on slower machines (tip: always have some outdated boxes in your office for testing). Also, I wanted the loader to play through quickly every time, just for effect, even if the movie had already downloaded and was in the cache. This requires two things: we need to know if the movie that we are loading has already been downloaded to the user's computer, and if that is the case we need to set a maximum frame rate for playing our loader before restarting the parent movie. The first bit is easy. Just check to see if the bytes loaded equals the total bytes of the parent movie. If so, we set a flag (I've called it "quickPlay") to true so that we don't have to check every frame. Otherwise we are interested in finding out how much pre-load we need to do, as before. Here's the code for the load event that sits on our loader movie: onClipEvent (load) {
if (_parent.getBytesTotal() == _parent.getBytesLoaded()) {
quickPlay = true;
} else {
preLoad = (_parent.getBytesTotal() * 0.75); //percent to preload
}
_parent.stop();
}
Now we need to tweak our enterFrame event handler to support this new condition. Given that we will somehow be playing our loader movie at a maximum speed, we will need a different test when we are playing the loader quickly because all of the bytes will already be loaded. We will do this be seeing if the playhead of our loader has reached the end of its animation. And here's the code for that: onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
gotoAndStop(loadedIndicatorFrame());
if (quickPlay == true) { //quickly play the anim
if (_currentframe == _totalframes) {
_parent.play();
}
} else { //wait for the preload
if (_parent.getBytesLoaded() >= preLoad) {
_parent.play();
}
}
}
"Now hang on a minute!" I hear you say. "Why don't you set quickPlay to false if have to wait for the movie to load? That's a sloppy bit of coding there!" Well, if we don't set quickPlay to true, when we do the test if (quickPlay == true) quickPlay will evaluate to "undefined" which certainly is not equal to "true", so the code works fine. And we save ourselves some bytes by not writing quickPlay = false; in the else clause in the load event handler. There's no real point in testing this code now because our loadedIndicatorFrame function will just jump straight to the end. But if you are really keen, you can remove the function entirely to see what happens. Doing a plain vanilla preview (Ctrl+Enter) now will allow your loader animation to play through once before continuing on with the parent movie. When previewing like this it is just like having already downloaded the entire movie, so this is doing our quickPlay bits of code. When streaming the preview (Ctrl+Enter again), you should see your loader animation loop until you hit the required percentage, then it will continue on playing the parent movie to the end.
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Yet Another Flash MX Loader
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