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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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Almost every Flash movie you create will be for the Web. The Internet is the playground for which Flash was primarily developed and the place it is generally used. The Internet is likely where you will place your games. For a game to be successful on the Web, you must ensure that it is optimized for broadcast over the Internet. Unlike games for the PlayStation or PC which run off DVDs or hard drives, a Web-based game is ultimately run through the Internet. The Internet is a fickle environment to which you need to tune your games.

In this guide you will learn how to optimize Flash for delivery over the Internet. Sharing your files is arguably one of the easier ways through which you can speed up the delivery of your movies. Flash allows you to share a great deal of tools between final, exported Flash movies.

In addition to sharing elements between Flash movies, there are additional tools that can be leveraged to help your movies as they are distributed over the Internet. Preloading is one of these key solutions. A preloader is a small script that you can place at the beginning of your Flash movie. The role of the preloader is to play a short movie clip until the entire Flash movie has downloaded. You extend the role of the preloader by converting it into a component.

Connecting Flash to the Internet

It used to be that the average user connecting to the Internet was doing so through a dial-up connection with a maximum throughput of 56Kb per second. Dial-up is not a friendly way of delivering content. The actual connection speed for dial-up users is frequently less than 33Kb per second. This means that 5Kb takes one second to download. Therefore, even a small Flash movie of 30Kb takes six seconds to download. Every second more a file takes to download, the greater the potential of your client going to another site.

The reality in today’s world is different. Most people use DSL or cable to connect to the Internet from their desktop computers. The challenge, and why you still need preloading, is wireless technology. Have you tried to connect to the Internet from your phone? Slower than molasses on a cold day? You bet it is. Heck, we are back to dial-up speeds again. However the cell phone companies are banking that you will want to surf the Internet from your phone. And they want you to do it in a way that is cool and rich. For that to become a reality, we’ll need to use Flash to manage content over slow connections.

The secret to successful movie development with Flash is to separate your files as much as possible. You can take a typical Flash movie and quite literally break it apart into individual components that you can use and reuse over many different movies.

Flash loads external files by downloading the main Flash movie and all external files, such as ActionScript files, audio tracks, and fonts. The downloaded files are then cached by the user's Web browser. Take, for instance, a game that uses sound effects. Suppose you have a file called beep.mp3 that makes all the beeping noises for every movie on the site. Beep.mp3 downloads the first time the user downloads the initial movie. Now, if other Flash movies on your site use sound, the user won't need to re-download the file. Flash knows it already has the beep.mp3 file on the hard drive.

Reusing files over several movies is a useful technique to speed up the download of any movie. Any object used two or more times should be considered as a candidate to be an external file. Once the file is downloaded, it can be used over and over again until the Web browser cache is cleared. The browser cache is a folder on your hard drive where downloaded files from the Internet usually end up. The Web browser, based on system settings, periodically removes older items in this folder.

Loading SWF movies

Flash 3 introduced a new feature that allows you to load external SWF movies into a main movie. The feature allows one file to be used repeatedly over many different movies.

You load an external SWF into a movie through the LoadMovie method for the Movie Clip object. You can load a movie clip into a file in two ways. The first method uses the Timeline and a named movie clip on the stage. Follow these steps:

Open a new movie in Flash. On the stage, create a shape with the shape tools. Save this file as shape.fla and export the movie as shape.swf. This movie loads dynamically into a new movie.
Create a new movie. Save this file as master.fla in the same folder as shape.swf. This is going to be to be the new movie through which you load shape.swf created in step 1. In the master.fla file draw a square 50 pixels by 50 pixels on the stage. Select the square and press F8.
Convert the shape into a movie clip. Name the clip placeHolder. Select the square on the stage. Name the new instance placeholder_mc. The "placeholder_mc" movie clip is now a target. You can programmatically load SWF files to this target.
Go to the Timeline. In Frame 1 of Layer 1 add the following ActionScript: loadMovie("shape.swf", "placeHolder_mc");

The ActionScript uses the loadMovie movie method. The loadMovie method allows you to locate a Flash movie and have it replace a named movie clip. In this case, you are loading the shape.swf file and targeting placeholder_mc. The loaded movie replaces the named movie clip. The loadMovie method only allows you to load external Flash movies that have been exported in the SWF file format. An FLA Flash file cannot be loaded with this method. Also, you must have a movie clip named so that you can target the external SWF file to the right place on the screen.
Preview the movie. Preview the movie to see that the rectangle shape is now replaced with the shape.swf file. The two movies now appear to be one.

Summary

The loadMovie method allows you to re-use files throughout your movie and other movies you create. This can include navigation, icons, movies...anything that can be exported as a Flash SWF movie. Effectively re-using SWF movies throughout your site is one immediate method of optimizing your Flash movies for delivery over the Internet. The files that are re-used are only downloaded once. The first time a visitor to your site clicks on a Flash link, they have to download all of the re-usable items on the page. The next Flash movie the visitor clicks on downloads only the new content for the movie; files that use the loadMovie method are likely already cached in your Web browser. The movies are optimized!

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