Splash2, Initialize and the speed of startup

[jon]

An application my company has built in SWFKit runs very slow at the begining of its operation.

Don't get me wrong, its trying to do a lot of stuff, theres a hundred meg of swf resources to load, .dll files to load and run, security dongles to check for. On top of all that the first thing the user sees (after the splash screen) is a big SWF video.

At the moment all of our code is in the initialize script in SWFKit. Is this how we should be doing it?

Can I extend the time the splash screen is on screen until more of this has happened? Maybe show a 'loading' screen at the start of the flash component and only trigger it to proceed once other operations are finished?

How should I be optimising the performance of a complex SWFKit application?

I am aware that these are not simple questions but I do need to understand a bit more to plan how this should work.

Should I hold off on making a getAdditionalFile() call until the flash movie itself calls a function? That way the flash could be displaying a 'loading' screen while getAdditionalFile() is proccessing. Then the Ffish script could move the flash timeline foward once getAdditionalFile had executed.

Is there a way to get feedback to the user on the progress of getAdditionalFile()?

Regards,
Jon Moyles

[SWFKit]

If you have a lot of resource files, we highly recommend that you don't pack them into the output executable file, as extracting these files will take time. Instead, you can just check the checkboxes before the file names in the "Resources" panel of SWFKit to encrypt them. The encrypted files cannot be played outside the executable file even if they aren't packed.

To extend the time of showing the splash window, you can do in the following way. First, when you create the Splash2 object, you can set a very big "timeout" value. Second, when everything has been done, you can call the "close" method of the Splash2 object to close it. Thus, the time of showing the splash window can be fully controlled by yourself.

[jon]

I'm afraid we are already not packing the resource files. Its still slow.

I will experiment with the location of the getAdditionalFile() call.

Do you have any other advice to offer? I know I asked a lot of fairly open ended questions and I am gratefull for your time.