Making Things + AS3 - Part 4 Serial LCD
QueueLoader AS3 rev 5

QueueLoader AS3 Update

Latest Version Info:
Click here for the current rev

Click here for the usage guide

Click here for the change log

Also click here for any posts related to the latest changes:
QueueLoader Updates

I made a significant and minor fix to the QueueLoader class.

There was a dupe event being dispatched for complete and init that was dispatching ITEM_INIT twice. My apologies for that.

I also changed the {name:”Image 1″} to reflect the custom event so it is now {title:”Image 1″}

Update
In response to Erik’s question; I’m assuming you are referring to swf files as an alternate file type? FLV files and Audio files would be a nice addition of functionality to the class for loading into your assets library. However in the meantime, you can load swf files using QueueLoader as it is. It’s a little convoluted but here’s how to do it:

Here’s a snippet of code to add the swf to the loading queue as well as it’s respective container, in this case using the MovieClip class.

var swf:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
swf.name = “swf”;
addChild(swf);
_oLoader.addItem(prefix(“”) + “flashassets/images/slideshow/WCS.swf”, swf, {title:“swf”});

In the listening functions we add some code to detect the MovieClip container and access the timeline in it’s target.

function onItemInit(event:QueueLoaderEvent):void {
        if(event.targ is MovieClip){
                var container:MovieClip = event.targ as MovieClip;
                var loader:Loader = container.getChildAt(0) as Loader;
                var clip:MovieClip = loader.content as MovieClip;
                clip.gotoAndPlay(2);
        }
}

The above snippet is from an example that loads images and then loads a swf. The external swf has a stop() command in its first frame. The above snippet is in the ITEM_INIT handler and plays the swf’s timeline once it’s loaded. Although from a practical standpoint you would assign the clip to a class variable and then do the gotoAndPlay command in the QUEUE_INIT handler once everything is done loading.

Something interesting I noted here as well. Might be worthy of a post on it’s own. If you simply “type” the above variables with their respective classes you will get a coercion error, whereas declaring them makes it work fine. I’m assuming this is because the event.targ variable returns a DisplayObject. I’ve already changed the DisplayObject to “*” in rev 3.0.6 but it still requires the “variable as Class”. I’ll post that code when I make some more progress.

So to sum it up: The above example is a bit of a hack for the time being. I will add a more direct method for accessing the timeline of a loaded swf as well as an event variable that specifies the content type in the not so distant future:) Beyond that I will look into the feasibility of loading external mp3 files, flv files, and zip files.

A more recent version of this code has been posted! Go HERE

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under AS3, Flash, QueueLoader, Source Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


2 Responses to “QueueLoader AS3 Update”

  1. Erik Lembke Says:
    September 13th, 2007 at 3:05 am

    Hi Donovan,

    thanks again for this nice working class. I just noticed the problems with the previous version and did some workarounds. What about preloading other filetypes than images? Would be really great!

  2. djdonovan Says:
    October 30th, 2007 at 11:44 am

    I’ve posted updates to QueueLoader here.

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