I have a flash site that I made. It has a screen that shows a progress bar for the intro as well as the site it'self. Sometimes it takes 10min to load at the beginning and sometimes it takes less than a minute. I don't know if a preloading script would help any. Cause there really doesn't seem room for it. I mean it has trouble enough loading what is on the page, much less loading things that our on other pages. Is there any tips or tricks that I could do to make it load quicker?
I heard of people using certain programs to make it run faster and load quicker, but how can you do that on a web site? Right now the intro and the site are all "one" flash movie, using diffrent scenes for pages and diffrent key frames for the various windows I have. Would it runs quicker if I broke up the website and intro into seprate movies? They still would have to load, but at least not all at the same time. Once it loads it runs great, but it's that first page that is driving me up the wall.
If I sepreated the site and intro, then I would put one movie on one page and then the other on a diffrent web page. So then there would be 2 movies and 2 pages. Right now there is just one page and one big movie. I am new to putting flash on the web, but not new to making flash, I used to use the stand alone player and just play everything on my computer.
Hmmmm. How large exactly is your movie? How large are the intro and main pages seperate? You might want to save load time by leaving out the intro page. Also you might want to have a preload instead of an intro page. Just some thoughts.
Splitting the flash movie up into seperate pieces is't going to do anything except make it harder to work with.
Your problem is 'bandwidth'. The content you have in the flash file itself is most likely the problem as flash would have to load the content before it can play.
Designing a Flash website is completly different to designing a HTML website. Your dealing with timelines and streaming content now. You need to start thinking differently, you need to start small and grow.....
Flash can stream data but you have to design the move to start of very small. Some small animations with small (file size wise) vector shapes to keep the user occupied or distracted while the rest of the data streams ahead. Basicaly creating a buffer of loaded content to be hand fed to the browser. If it hits a large file it needs to load this buffer time will (depending on how much time you've saved) will keeps things running smoothly. There's a special tool you can use while previwing your movie that will test the stream rate on various connection speeds with a niffty little graph to make things easier for you.
In addition to all of this, try and cut out as many bitmaps as you can. Flash does support bitmap images but it's crap at compressing them, and it also has to load the entire image before it can display it. Depending on where the bitmap is on the timeline this could also create a huge-bottle neck for the rest of the content. So, aviod using bitmaps in any start/intro animations at all costs!
Sounds are exactly the same. While Flash does support mp3 streaming alongside it's fantastic amination feats, it slows things down to a crawl. Think about it though, Flash uses MP3 encoding for it's audio and even 56k users have a hard time streaming mp3 encoded radio content smoothly, let alsone adding the rest of the flash animations to the mix.
Another bandwidth killer in flash is it's font support. Sure, you can use any font you like but beware the size of the font file you choose. Most font's just aren't optimised with file size and web streaming in mind (I've come accross some that are over 100k!). Any text using a font from a huge font file could also cause big bottle-necks as the entire font file must be downloaded/streamed before any text can be rendered.
So, check the file size of your flash movie. Use the bandwith tool and trim off as much fat as you can....
Hey guys thanks for the advice! I trimmed it down a bit. Please look at the page and give me some feedback, its not competly done, but you can get the idea of how it loads. here is the Flash site
.:: Jon ::.
[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 11-06-2001).]
Wow. That must be a *big* swf - it takes ages on DSL. And that's to get to the loading progress bar! Never saw a prelaoder that needed a preloader
How come you did it that way? I see a "loading" screen for what feels like ages, and when that goes away I see a loading progress bar that goes on for another age. I'll admit that I couldn't stick around for the whole show. The preliminary animations were really very nice, but I didn't have time to see what came next to figure out what was taking so long to load. What is it - lots of bitmap images? Sounds?
It's the sounds steve. There is a wave that plays for the whole animation, I need to cut it off and loop it so the file size will be smaller. There is a preloader for the intro and a preloader for the web site. You aren't really supposed to see the first preloader. It usually skips it when I view it. Alot of people told me think week that they never see that first preloader, so I dunno. I know I need to do something with the sounds and covert my bitmaps to jpegs. That should help it a little, but not much.
I'll send you a exe. file so you can view it in on your comp. Then you can see the whole thing like it was supposed to be seen
:: Jon ::
[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 11-01-2001).]
Woah. Now I'm really confused (haven't had a chance to see if I can play the exe file on my mac yet).
A preloader for the intro *and* a preloader for the "web site"? Maybe I'm confused but you can't seriously expect people to sit thru two lengthy preload sequences. Could you maybe use the intro as the "preload" for the website? Preloader for intro, then site content streams in while intro plays?
And as to why some folk have a long wait and some don't - your friends probably already have the swf in their browser's cache from the first time they watched it. It shouldn't take nearly as long the second time unless you have cleared the cache. Just a theory
Sound - have you considered streaming it so the whole whopper doesn't have to download before anything at all starts?
bitmapped - importing jpegs won't do anything (except perhaps reduce the quality); what affects file size is how you have Flash configured. I recommend importing bitmaps as png files - yes, the fla gets big, but the swf size is determined by how much compression you have set in the publish settings.
I haven't had anyone actually see the first preload screen yet
It usually skips it or it takes a couple of seconds. I dunno what I am going to do. I'll take the advice and play with it some more. The exe. file should play on your computer... I think ...
:: Jon ::
[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 11-05-2001).]
Ok I just took out the preload for the intro. And I streamed all my MP3's and cut alot of useless stuff out of the project. These are the results so far, Anymore ideas on how I can cut this baby down?
56k 105.27 seconds
128k 47.67 seconds
T1 6.06 seconds
Cable 1 second
T3 1 second
[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 11-05-2001).]
Fig- The file was 900KB, I trimmed it down to 700KB there abouts.
Steve-Thanks, I just took your advice and little by little it started to get smaller and run better. Don't ask me what I was thinking with that first preloader, heh, the intro didn't need one.
.:: Jon ::.
[This message has been edited by Dark (edited 11-06-2001).]
posted 11-01-2001 00:36
