Hello everyone

Ainriail

Here is my problem, I never heard of PHP before but am thrust into using it. I am a flash builder and posted a question on the flash forum,

Hello does anyone know how to make a movie load the first frame the first time, but if it is the second time the page is being viewed to skip over the first frame? I have a pre-loader which is located in the first frame and when revisiting the movie the loader always pops up for that split second. How can I solve my problem. Or what should I do? Thank you,
Marc

The answer that I got was

It could be done with PHP. To make a cookie the first time and then send a variable to the flash movie upon return to be used in actionScript to gotoAndPlay(beyondPreLoader); . You will need PHP on your server to have it work, though. I'm learning PHP now, it's pretty cool!!

I don't even know where to begin. Can anyone help?
Thanks,
marc😉

chadu

Is the reason you want to skip it for the user's convenience for not having to see the intro again, or to prevent having to see the preloader since the movie is already cached by the user's browser?

Depending on what the answer is, you could do this a couple ways...

you can use sessions, instead of cookies to do this as well...

chadu

in the page that holds the flash movie, you can start a session like this... Then you will want to create a variable to store whether or not the flsah file has been seen...

<?php session_start();
session_register('flashSeen'); 
?>

Then from within your Flash movie, you can set the variable "flashSeen" to true or 1 or yes or whatever value you want to use to track it by using the Actionscript command "loadVariable"

You'll want to load your variable from the page that the Flash movie is on, and append the URL with "?flashSeen=True"

Then it is simply a case of putting logic in your flash movie to do some thing like

if (flashSeen == TRUE) then gotoAndPlay(3)....

This is of course not the actual code, but mayb ethis will help you work thorugh it a bit?

Also, I would recommend moving you intro back to at least frame 3 and putting the logic for choosing the frame to frame 2... Flash movies dont always seem to do what they are told on Frame 1, especially if there are a lot of things loading or animating.

Hope this helps.

Ainriail

The reason is to prevent having to see the preloader again since the movie is already cached. But thanks for the code. I have a quick question, I put the code that you gave in the html script from dreamweaver. But where you said,

You'll want to load your variable from the page that the Flash movie is on, and append the URL with "?flashSeen=True"

I still am very confused. I put this in the end of my url like www.bomantas.0catch.com/Home.html?flashSeen=True, but it did not take. But your suggestions helped me out a lot. Thanks again,
Marc

chadu

I would try using PHP to echo out the value of 'flashSeen' to the browser then... like this...

<?php echo $flashSeen ?>

this will let you know if it actually was passed to the script...

and where you place the swf file in the html, you probably should place the file using some thing like this....

src=flashMovie.swf?flashSeen=<?php echo $flashSeen ?>

hope this helps.