[Fling] About the cummulative loader...

[John Grden]

I was talking to Chris about this yesterday and he mentioned that we're
finaly at that point in development where we get to write the loading
manager ;)

Yes, this is where this application will make it's money:  This is why Asset
Manager is so cool.

Some items we have to consider when creating the main loader engine:

for this, let's use an example of loading 10 assets with an AssetLoader.

1.  Dispatch loaded percentage only AFTER you have all of the total bytes
for all items being loaded OR all items that have byte totals.  If one
doesn't have a byte total or nothing was set in the xml about a files total
bytes, then you'll have a preloader that jumps around, but it WILL work.
You just forfeit having it move gracefully.

2.  Load failing.  What happens when you try to load an asset that wasn't
copied to the staging server or the server just isn't serving up (que length
issues, saturation of the server/pipe etc)?  You have to be able to assign
drop dead timeout whereby you remove the asset that failed to load from the
total load OR you simply jump out of the load altogether and generate an
error.  Either way, you need to generate an error with the offending
file(s).

3.  startLoadTimeOut and totalLoadTimeOut should be considered here.
startLoadTimeOut is the time (ms) that the load engine will wait for an
asset to register any bytes loaded.  totalLoadTimeOut is a limit on the
amount of time you're willing to wait for an asset(s) to load (it can be
either per asset OR on the total load).  If it exceeds that time, you
generate an error, remove the offending asset, and continue with the rest of
the load.

Now, in talking to Chris about this, he seemed to initially think that
having a startLoadTimeOut/totalLoadTimeout built into this load engine was
outside of this current goal.  I think it's just because it sounds like alot
more work that we planned on.  However, when you look at what I've said
above, you see that you can't really do it without these options.  You can't
have an assetLoader dying on you silently.

Dying silently can simply be that one asset never loads and therefore, your
site never continues because the totalLoad event never fires.  So, by shear
basic need, you at least have to have a totalLoadTimeOut for the entire
package.  Otherwise, you'll just sit there waiting without any knowledge of
a problem.

So, that's what we need to write ;)

thoughts?

-- 
John Grden - Blitz
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