Hi Miguel
Here is a suggestion:
1). Create a different external castLib for each of the required variations
2). When they make a selection that will require the use of one of the other
external castlibs, perform a preloadNetThing to preload the "new" external
castlib. When the preload has completed, simply assign the filename of the
original castlib, the url/filename of the new castlib. the old castlib will
drop out and the new castlib will take its place.
3). When building the external castlibs, be extremely cautious about
placement of all the pieces. For instance if you are score referencing a
particular castmember in slot 1 of the castlib for a background graphic,
then if each of the variation external castlibs should contain their
background graphic in slot 1, this way when the castlibs do their little
swap, the new background graphic will swap in without any code work.
If your variations share common elements, then create an additional external
castlib that will contain only those common components so that you don't
have to needlessly download a whole pile of stuff that already exists. This
keeps the file size of the swapable castlib to a bare minimum thus making it
easier to download and swap on the fly.
DO NOT attempt to swap a castlib's filename with one that has not been
preloaded, all kinds of nasty things are prone to happen. Please take some
time and brush up on all the netLingo, use of NetID's to track things. One
final point, give the user some indication of what is going on while the
preload event is happening, if possible create a little loading popup that
includes a progress bar and if feasible a method by which they can cancel
out if it is going to take ages to download (this of course assumes that it
would be possible for the enduser to continue on in your program without
changing to one of the other external castlibs. If you want to think ahead,
once the main movie has completed downloading, use a little bit of
imaginative AI to begin preloading some of the additional castlibs in the
background (ONE AT A TIME) so that when they need to change castlibs, there
is a good chance the castlib will already be on disk and the change will be
almost instantaneous. This would assume though that you don't have 300 or so
200 Kb external castlibs to preload, and whether or not the user will be apt
to spend enough time in the application and that they would eventually use
most of the external castlibs you have hidden away on the server.
Does this help at all.
Sincerely
Mark
--------------------------------------------
Mark R. Jonkman
Mark R. Jonkman Consulting
ADDRESS: 20 Windermere Crt., Guelph, ON, CANADA N1E 3L4
PHONE: 519-837-8509
EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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