Help with a pre-loader?

[iamali]

Hi all

I've been working on this - www.aegreen.co.uk/creativetech.php for a university assignment. The user creates their own sheep and then has the option of emailing it to themselves. What I'm stuck on is getting a pre-loader to work..

After the sheep is created the user is asked to name the sheep, and when the user clicks next bitmapdata method is used to save a jpg of the sheep to the server. The problem is the php page used to do this opens as a new window in front of the window with the flash application in.

What I'm wondering is, is there a way that this window could not open and instead a pre-loader loaded from 0-100% while the sheep is being saved to the server before going onto the next frame? I've had a play with no success.. Here's some of my code.

This is the actionscript in Flash I'm using to save the JPGS. Found some code for a preloader but it's not working:

import flash.display.BitmapData;
btn_next.onPress = function() {
	output();
	gotoandstop(5);
};

function output() {
	snap = new BitmapData(305, 290);
	snap.draw(mc_modifysheep);
	var pixels:Array = new Array();
	var w:Number = snap.width;
	var h:Number = snap.height;
	var z:Number = 0
	for (var a = 0; a <= w; a++) {
		for (var b = 0; b <= h; b++) {
			var tmp = snap.getPixel(a, b).toString(16);
			pixels.push(tmp);
		}
	}
	perc = int((z * 100)/w)
	preloader.perc.text = perc+" %"
	preloader.barra._xscale = perc 			 
	z++

	var output:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
	output.img = pixels.toString();
	output.height = h;
	output.width = w;
	output.send("show.php", "output", "POST");
}
stop();

This is the PHP used to actually save the image to disk:

<?php
$data = explode(",", $_POST['img']);
$width = $_POST['width'];
$height = $_POST['height'];
$image=imagecreatetruecolor( $width ,$height );
$background = imagecolorallocate( $image ,0 , 0 , 0 );

//Copy pixels
$i = 0;
for($x=0; $x<=$width; $x++){
	for($y=0; $y<=$height; $y++){
		$int = hexdec($data[$i++]);
		$color = ImageColorAllocate ($image, 0xFF & ($int >> 0x10), 0xFF & ($int >> 0x8), 0xFF & $int);
		imagesetpixel ( $image , $x , $y , $color );
	}
}

//Output image and clean
header( "Content-type: image/jpeg" );
ImageJPEG( $image, "img/image".uniqid("").".jpg" );

//ImageJPEG( $image )
imagedestroy( $image );	
?>

Thanks everyone!

[ifmi]

hi, try change this line of code:

output.send("show.php", "output", "POST");

to

output.loadVariables ("show.php", "POST");

[iamali]

tried that, and it doesn't save the sheep to the server anymore