Comments on: Writing a preloader in ActionScript 3

By: William Chadwick

William Chadwick — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:47:30 +0000

You wrote: “Actually since Adobe has all these nebulous products floating around that all pretty much do the same thing (Flash, Flex, Air, who knows what else), it’s a little confusing what language you are using for your source files.”

To clear up the confusion about the different products (Flex Builder, Flash IDE, AIR): the Flash IDE is for Designers and graphic artists; the Flex IDE is for programmers and developers; and AIR allows a person to run a Flash file on their desktop without all the onerous security restrictions that the Flash Player in the Browser has (Firefox, IE, etc).It makes perfect sense for all these to be separate products. Most programmers are familiar with frameworks like Flex, but designers and artists do not use frameworks like that.

It is a shame that Adobe has not done more to help with the pre-loader issue, especially the bug that makes the preloader fail when using deep linking in Flex.

By: Adam

Adam — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:05:18 +0000

Yeah it was nice when it worked, however nothing could make me miss ActionScript 2!

By: Tim Kloske

Tim Kloske — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:36:57 +0000

I really miss ActionScript 2.0. I know it was horrible, but at least you could create a preloader without much hassle.
loaded=(_root.getBytesLoaded/_root.getBytesTotal)*100
that was the ActionScript 2.0 way to create a preloader. Alternatively, you could try create a separate container preloader .swf that uses ActionScript 2.0 to load the actual game (and then the game itself could run in ActionScript 3.0). I’m not entirely sure if this will help you at all though. Good luck with your project!

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:41:45 +0000

ENTER_FRAME events actually fire repeatedly, at the frame rate set by the app.

It is accurate on a local test, but if you try loading your SWF remotely, or with a slow-connection-simulator, bytesLoaded actually only reflects the size of frame 1. Yet another issue of clearly broken functionality by Adobe.. ;(

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:25:10 +0000

I don’t like the bit-101 solution since it’s broken. Since his code only updates progress on Event.ENTER_FRAME, which is only called….you guessed, once when you first enter the frame, it’ll only update once.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say loaderInfo.bytesLoaded isn’t the actual size. If I modify the bit-101 solution to update on progress events, and then write loaderInfo.bytesLoaded to Firebug, it shows a continually changing value.

By: Zandor 12

Zandor 12 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:38:44 +0000

“Behold! We have created a language so mysterious that even we do not know what it does!!”

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:34:01 +0000

im sort of into programming, but i don’t like reading technical posts that are this long! ill read half…or try to.