Flash CS4 IDE based project and embed metadata tags

[Byron Atkinson-Jones]

I posted this in one of the other sub-forums before I realised this one was available.

I am moving over to using the Flex based embed metadata tags to import assets into my Flash CS4 IDE based project. This is working very well but I have hit one small problem - how do you now create a pre-loader? I've done the usual google to look for a solution and found many Flex based solutions and tried them all out but they do not appear to work from within a CS4 IDE based project - even when tried out on a web page.

Is there a solution to this?

[Michael Borbor]

You should look for a flash preloader, like this one.

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/percentagepreloader.htm

Flex uses the mx.preloaders which is part of the Flex SDK, and this is not

available to use inside Flash.

[Byron Atkinson-Jones]

I know how to make the usual kind of preloader but when using the embed tags it would appear there is no way to force the loading of that data to a following frame so the entire SWF loads before your pre-loader gets a look in.

[Michael Borbor]

Oh sorry I see what you mean. Well when you embed something it's a part of

the SWF you know that, so I'm curious about your setup. Could you post your

fla file or your fla file structure to have a better idea about what you

want.

[Byron Atkinson-Jones]

I can't post the fla here because of NDA issues (it's not my project - one I have been asked to work on) but...

My project setup is simple. I have no timeline or library elements. I make use of the document class to specify a class to load as the timeline. So this means that my entire project is really just a collection of as3 files.

Previously when working this way I did use the library and place all the assets on frame 2 and use frame 1 as the pre-loader.

Now that I have CS4 embedding assets is a lot simpler using the embed metadata tag but it would appear that there is no way to get preloader information out of the swf anymore. Flex manages this by using a preloader class but it does not seem to exist when building projects from the CS4 IDE.

[DJ Gecko]

I'm doing the same thing, it's great to have the embed function, but the swf loads all embed content before anything else.  This for me makes the feature useless. I make games and game sites want everything in one swf, so making a separate swf preloader wont work for me.  Hope Adobe creates a solution for this. 

Here are my post on the subject:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/499997?tstart=0

and

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/499994?tstart=0

Also I submitted a feature request with Adobe, I suggest you do the same.

good luck!