So apparantly I'm stupid. To date, anything I've had to do when programming in Actionscript 3 has boiled down to one of two situations that has, for the most part, made it all easier for me:

- I am doing the coding in frames, allowing me to use a preloader built in the same manner (Which is how I'm used to preloaders). Typically it was a small amount of programming.

- I am building something where I don't need to worry about download times and such, as the files will only be viewed offline directly off someone's hard drive. This meant I didn't need a preloader. This is the situation whenever I had to work with document classes.

However, I am working on a project that is a little... too big to be done in the first method, but I have no experience with preloaders when using a document class. I've done some research on how to do it, but I found that the methods used have one of two problems:

- A built-in preloader won't deal with linkage as part of the loading process, as it were, and thus if I have any movieclips with AS3 linkage (Which I will have a lot, and they will comprise at least half of the file size which I'm already predicting to be 10 to 15 MB), it means the preloader is going to be retarded and not show this properly.

or

- Using an external file to store the content and load it in, which is not an option since I want it contained all in a single file.


So I'm now trying to play with a way to use preloaders I know and combine them with a document class. Is it as simple as I'm looking at it? Can I just built a preloader movieclip, throw it into the first frame, and have it that when the preloader ends it will make the document class run a function that then chains everything else (And thus the constructor for the document class doesn't really do anything, since it will not be running anything)? Or is there another way I can proceed that will make more sense and make me look less like an idiot?