Re: FLASH: load url or movie better?

[Marc Hoffman]

At 10:48 AM 5/10/99 -0400, you wrote:

>I received this critique of my draft site:

>

>www.petersonsales.net/flashintro.html

>I don't have a link from the end of the 

>movie to the beginning of the flash, so the only way a person will get 

>this to repeat is if they hit the back button After they make a menu 

>choice...



Hi Jeff,

I had to look  at the site to see what you were referring to. It is

confusing to talk about "pages in Flash" since Flash doesn't contain html

pages but rather is contained within html pages.  That's why I will talk

about sequences (to differentiate them from scenes) in Flash.


While the viewer is in Flash he or she should not need to use the browser

back button except to go to a different site. you would normally use this

only if your site were text or bitmap heavy and, as a result, you were

using html pages that combined Flash with non-Flash content.  I think the

criticism you received is that when entering the Flash introduction page

for a repeat visit, the viewer must wait through the "ship arrival"

sequence, which is too slow even the first time through.


I see you already have a preloader with an If Frame Is Loaded loop to

control it.  What you need is a second If Frame Is Loaded loop before the

existing one.  It would test to see if the movie has been loaded up to the

point where the menu has been presented ( or perhaps check to see if the

last frame of the movie has been loaded) -- if that condition is met, the

movie should go right to where the menu is visible.  If not, it should go

to the existing preload loop which will hold things up until enough of the

movie has loaded to show the "ship arrives" sequence smoothly.


On a 56k connection (in reality, 48k), the ship arrival sequence is not

smooth because you haven't preloaded enough frames.  But I would not hold

up the preload longer if I were you -- instead, I would optimize the movie.

 The water motion is very file size and processor intensive.  I'm sure it's

lovely viewed locally on a fast machine, but it's deadly for web usage.

Make the water image a whole lot less detailed, and just have a little

movie clip with a few ripples of light that dance on the surface, instead

of varying the entire image.  The ship could also be simplified to tween

faster. Then you can add more frames to the tween to reduce jerkiness.  As

it is,  the complexity of the tween (and the resulting processor demands)

is slowing things down as well as the fact that download isn't keeping up

with the frame rate.  A fast connection compensate for bandwidth problems

but not for the complexity of tween. That is, even if the whole thing were

loaded it would still be jerky on slower machines -- I viewed this on a

P166 and modest 2-meg video card.


If you can handle a bit more critiquing -- although the little toggle

switches on the menu are nifty, they don't relate to the nautical theme and

are not intuitive.  Usually I expect to click right on the text to make

something happen. Perhaps the items could be contained in a series of flags

or smaller sails, something to integrate it with the ship theme and also to

give a larger hit area.


The frog, too, is cute but not relevant to your site or theme.  I think

your visitors will be better rewarded, and more inclined to wait, if you

give them some material that increases their knowledge of the company.

Text, if you limit the number of fonts used, consumes very little file

size.  If you stick with the frog, give the viewer a way to turn off the

sound, or have the sound fade and disappear after the first three or four

"boings."


Hope this helps.  What you are doing is complex and requires a lot of tools

and tricks, so keep at it.





Marc Hoffman

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

marcdartfrogmedia [dot] com (mailto:marcdartfrogmedia [dot] com)

Play a virtual marimba at: <www.dartfrogmedia.com/dartfrog> (featured 

in the book Flash 3 Web Animation by Ken Milburn).

Flash3 samples: <http://www.jps.net/dartfrog/sampler>.


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