Flash Site Design - Flash web site strategies: scenes, movies or one long timeline?

Author

Flash web site strategies: scenes, movies or one long timeline?

Frank

2005-04-27, 11:14 pm

I posted this earlier on macromedia.flash but just discovered this
newsgroup - sorry for the duplication. Here's my question:

I'm just creating my first all-Flash web site and wondered what the
prevailing strategy is: I've found some tutorials that advise you to
break up the web site into different scenes, others that advise you to
break it up into different swf's and use loadMovie instead, and others
that say just make two scenes: use the first one for the pre-loader and
have the rest of the web site in a second scene as one long timeline
with lots of layers.

I know it can be done any of these ways, but what method do _most_
designers of all-Flash web sites use? Any advantages to one method over
the others?

Thanks,
- Frank

Jeckyl

2005-04-28, 4:14 am

> Breaking up ur flash into scenes is a definite no-no.

There is nothing wrong with scenes if your movie is naturally broken into
separate scene and it helps you work better.

Just don't use the scenes in navigation, and don't use gotoAndPlay/Stop
without a dot prefix.

However, it is more flexible NOT to use scenes .. eg if you want some sort
of transiation between you 'scenes', then you cannot use scenes (as when a
scene ends its content is deleted completel and new scene placed .. can't do
things like fade one out and another in), and if you want some content to
stay (like navigation) then that is trickier with scenes (for the same
reasons).

That said, unless you want to see lots of stuff in from your entire movie in
the one timeline, breaking up into smaller SWF files is good (for authoring
purposes .. make sure you share resources as much as possible between the
swf to avoid file sizes getting too big). That also means, if you movie is
non-linear, that you can simply load the section you need when you need it,
rather than loading one bug movie all at once.

On the other hand, if you're making a CD projector presentation , you are
probalby better with one big movie.

There's no one fixed good way of doing things .. There's lots of techinques
and some are useful in some cases and others in others.

Jeckyl

Frank

2005-04-28, 7:23 pm

Thanks a lot, Jeckyl. The site I'm working on doesn't really have
different scenes, so it's good to know there's no particular advantage
to making them. Separate swfs sounds like the way to go for this one.

- Frank

wrote:
>
>
> There is nothing wrong with scenes if your movie is naturally broken into
> separate scene and it helps you work better.
>
> Just don't use the scenes in navigation, and don't use gotoAndPlay/Stop
> without a dot prefix.
>
> However, it is more flexible NOT to use scenes .. eg if you want some sort
> of transiation between you 'scenes', then you cannot use scenes (as when a
> scene ends its content is deleted completel and new scene placed .. can't do
> things like fade one out and another in), and if you want some content to
> stay (like navigation) then that is trickier with scenes (for the same
> reasons).
>
> That said, unless you want to see lots of stuff in from your entire movie in
> the one timeline, breaking up into smaller SWF files is good (for authoring
> purposes .. make sure you share resources as much as possible between the
> swf to avoid file sizes getting too big). That also means, if you movie is
> non-linear, that you can simply load the section you need when you need it,
> rather than loading one bug movie all at once.
>
> On the other hand, if you're making a CD projector presentation , you are
> probalby better with one big movie.
>
> There's no one fixed good way of doing things .. There's lots of techinques
> and some are useful in some cases and others in others.
>
> Jeckyl
>
>