[Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

Wed Sep 21 10:28:09 BST 2011

Made the transparent background that defines the size of the movie a movieclip, not just a filled rectangle on the stage.

I need to put some alerts in and find out when various things are happening. I think what is happening is:

- The movie loads (sure of this, because otherwise onLoad doesn't fire)
- The movie starts to instantiate - it's set to bottom up, so the bottom layers should instantiate first. - -  - The bottom layer contains the defining movieclip.
- Sometime between that point, and the point where i) the first frames of all the layers in the loaded movie executing their code ii) the first frames of all layers have instantiated their graphics, onLoad fires.
- Interrogating the movie in onLoad gives us 0,0 for w,h because the stage has not redrawn in the loaded movie yet (remember the flash player does code then graphics, and I have come across similar timing issues where the object exists, but has no dimensions yet, because the code has executed but the graphics have not been updated.
- Consequently things go bad.

So the answer (which needs exploring) is to make sure the loaded movie isn't spending time / CPU cycles instantiating higher layers. I bet that if there was nothing in frame 1 but the defining rectangle, and a button to play the animation, things would work fine. I'm going to check that out. What I am fairly confident of is that we don't see these issues with simple one frame / lots of code style swfs. The loaded swf we have the most problem with in these tests is the one with the most sophisticated graphics, so a pattern emerges...

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ron Mitchell
Sent: 20 September 2011 14:58
To: 'Xerte discussion list'
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

sorry dipping in and out between other things... that one is working fine on every page in both IE and my marginal case browser ;-)

What changed?

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 20 September 2011 14:41
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

Right, give it a whirl for me now: seems OK now...
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_5748

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 20 September 2011 14:27
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

Dunno. Banging on it, I can make it fail maybe 1 in 200 times, here on a fairly snappy network.

If the path was evaluating to undefined, it would be doing that every time. Do you get undefined, even when the page loads correctly?

Let's get our new test case up and running and see what happens then.

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Dave Burnett
Sent: 20 September 2011 14:24
To: Xerte list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

Undefined a steady 27Kb.

sequence:

whitepanel.swf
undefined
the_actual_page swf.

Is something occupying the cpu so it is "missing" the onLoad?
Win 2K, IE6
No animations no matter how long I wait.

________________________________
From: Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk
To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:19:24 +0100
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...
Hmm. I think that's something else.

We're building a new test case, be interesting to see if that still trips the undefined...

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Dave Burnett
Sent: 20 September 2011 14:17
To: Xerte list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

I'm getting an undefined in the cache.

??
________________________________
From: Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk
To: xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:56:23 +0100
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...
Let's get it working reliably in IE on windows before we start worrying about the more marginal cases...

;-)

What seems to the case is that the onLoad event fires (the swf has loaded) and the white panel is positioned and resized - to a movie size of 0,0 at that point in time. The movies currently have a graphic symbol in frame 1 that defines their size: that should be the size when you interrogate it in onLoad, however, sometimes it is reporting 0,0.

The movies did have a graphic symbol in frame 1. We are changing those to be movieclips, and making sure they are present right across the timeline.

Is it possible for a movie to load, with a movieclip in frame 1 at 0,0 of 200,300 width / height to report a size of 0,0 in the onLoad handler? It shouldn't be... in my experience if a movie fails to load, onLoad doesn't fire at all, it's not got a success parameter in the function like the xml loaders.

So I am assuming that:

If onLoad fires, the movieclip has in fact loaded successfully;
If onLoad fires, the movieclip has been instantiated in the loading movie;
If onLoad fires, then the width and height of the loaded clip should reflect its width and height in frame 1.

Yes?

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ron Mitchell
Sent: 20 September 2011 13:46
To: 'Xerte discussion list'
Subject: [Xerte] Re: Quick Test...

Not many pages working in Safari on Windows 7 :-(
(Flash player version shown at end) http://www.screenr.com/NBKs

Slightly better in IE but still a lot of pages not showing anything but text content.

HTH
Ron

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 20 September 2011 11:27
To: Xerte discussion list
Cc: Colleen Mccants
Subject: [Xerte] Quick Test...

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_5748
Do you see animations on all the pages?

If not, if you clear your cache, do you see animations on all the pages?

Can you let me know browser and version, flash player and version in any report?

Thanks,

J

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