Design structure help (multiple loadmovie)

[ccoston]

I am designing a video player for a client that has a row of thumbs below the main player window. When hovering over any particular thumb, I want a still image (jpg) loaded into the main player window at the size of the video (no resizing needed, the images will be in the same size as the player window).

All of the thumbs will be populated via actionscript/XML. That is no problem for me. However, I am trying to decide which way to lay this out in order to get the best performance. I don't want to make a loadmovie call on the hover, I would rather all the full sized pictures load in as soon as the movie starts loading.

I was thinking of creating a holder movieclip for all the pictures, with each picture residing on it's own frame in the timeline, loaded into an emptyMC at the time the XML file is called. That way rollovers could just call the specific frame in the holder movieclip instead of having to call a loadmovie and wait for the image to load on each rollover.

Is that the best way to do it? Or can someone think of something more ideal?

[Musicman]

Hi,

once you have different clips with different images in different frames, you lose the contents when you switch frames (but they will of course load faster from cache)
A different approach would be to create a stack of clips that stay in place all the time, and are made visible/invisible as needed

Musicman

[ccoston]

Hi,

once you have different clips with different images in different frames, you lose the contents when you switch frames (but they will of course load faster from cache)
A different approach would be to create a stack of clips that stay in place all the time, and are made visible/invisible as needed

Musicman

Thanks! I forgot to check back here the last couple days as I was not actively working on the project. I came to the same idea you did. As I loop through the XML, I can just increment a variable and use that for the dirty work of naming and setting up rollover/rollout events.

[ccoston]

I have it mostly working. However, I have this issue: This is all populating via an XML file, and the pictures are loaded into incrementally named created empty clips. I would like node 0's picture to be displayed upon loading complete, and I'm trying to code the _visible property for the created movieclip "descpic0" to true while setting all others to _false to start with. For some reason the last node (in this instance, node 5)'s pic is what gets displayed always.

I've tried testing for a completed load before setting the visibility, but to no avail. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[ccoston]

Fixed... used moviecliploader instead of loadmovie so that I could utilize the "onComplete" event.