[osflash] AS2 MovieClipLoader timeout

[David Christensen]

Greetings folks,

A little background about my project:  I have a custom-written flash  
application which is loading one of a number of external SWF files  
depending on certain form parameters in the HTML.  The application is  
completely written in ActionScript 2.0 using mtasc (targeting Flash  
8).  The external files are created using swfmill and consist of a  
number of image files gathered together into a single movie, with  
each image on a frame.  Each of the auxiliary files can range between  
2-4MB, depending on the number of images in the file.

My original approach was to try to do a createEmptyMovieClip() and  
then manually load the page images incrementally during the app  
initialization phase, essentially reproducing what the swfmill  
preprocessing code is doing, however I was not able to get this to  
work successfully.  Right now, the application depends on the fact  
that there is a single movie clip with each frame being an image, and  
changing this to use incrementally-loaded images each in their own  
instance/layer would be too work-intensive.

The application works great, I use a MovieClipLoader to download the  
remote SWF; however intermittently I get an error about the document  
loading slowly, and Flash Player asks if I would like to terminate  
the execution.  From my research online, it appears that this can be  
due to the loading of the external file taking more than a predefined  
timeout (30 seconds IIRC).  I feel like I've seen files which will  
take longer to load and execute, so I believe there must be a way  
around this issue.

A couple questions:

1) is there a way to increase the timeout value in Flash 8/9?

2) lacking that, is there a way to dynamically add/create frames in a  
movie clip populated with remote images?

3) any suggestions for general loading tuning or other ways to  
approach this problem?

Regards,

David
--
David Christensen
End Point Corporation
david at endpoint.com