scottwitte

Brilliant!! That totally escaped me but it seems it should do exactly what I want. Actually, it is pretty darn cool how flexible your classes can be. I will give this a shot. Thanks. Scott

That is what I had been doing for the past several months until it occurred to me that it wasted bandwidth. My intent is to determine a visitor's download speed to help them decide if they want to view the site in the smaller, faster loading version or in full screen version with its larger file sizes and slower download. You can see what I mean here: http://www.tourdeforce360.com/madison So I figure, rather than download a file that simply gets dumped, use the first low resolution file. That way if they choose to view in SD the file is already there. No added bandwidth. (And this site has been burning through lots of bandwidth.) Of course it doesn't work correctly if the file is already in cache. But apparently Flash provides a way to force download from the server, not cache. As I understand it that would be "req.method = URLRequestMethod.POST" Might it make sense to add this capability to loaderMax? BTW, it may already be obvious to most, but for folk like me a little extra clarification in the docs about what flushing does (or doesn't do) could be helpful. Thanks, as always.

Jack, What am I doing wrong? My objective is to force the download of some files from the server even if they are currently in the browser cache. My understanding is that load(true) would do that by flushing those files from the cache before starting the load, but it doesn't seem to be working for me. For example: var speedLoader:LoaderMax; speedLoader = new LoaderMax({onComplete:endSpeedTest, maxConnections:6, auditSize:false});; var _url:String; for (var i:uint=0; i<6; i++) { _url = "images/speedtest_"+i+".jpg" speedLoader.append( new ImageLoader(_url, {estimatedBytes:179372})); } speedLoader.load(true); If I clear the browser cache and run this it takes some seconds to complete. If I then reload the page (not clearing browser cache) and run this again it takes 0.1 seconds to complete. Obviously the files are not being flushed from the cache by load(true). So, what should I do to accomplish my objective? If I weren't using loaderMax I might try something involving " req.method = URLRequestMethod.POST; " But that doesn't seem applicable here. Thanks, Scott

Jack, 1) I am using the library from 11/22, so not the most recent. Time to update. 2) Yes, I disabled auditSize. For my purpose here measuring progress was of no interest but getting started with the least delay was. As I understand it I won't get the "double-load thing" if auditSize:false. And if I did it wouldn't result in the total download every time you visit the page that I see. 3) Sillier things have happened. However, if I had set noCache:true I would see the same results in all browsers, not just Safari. And yes, I did check just to be absolutely sure. Anyway, since I've now duplicated the issue on other Flash sites that have nothing to do with LoaderMax I don't think LoaderMax is the issue. For example, try downloading the same tour multiple time from here: http://krpano.com/examples/vtour/ You will see the same results.

Shoot! More testing and I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with LoaderMax. It seems Safari caches nothing Flash related! Absolutely refuses. Is this another attempt by Apple to prove that Flash is inferior???? Totally sucks.

Jack, I just found that when loading assets using LoaderMax they doesn't get cached... at least using Safari 5 in WinXP32. The files in the queue get downloaded, but when you go to use them they aren't in the cache and need to be downloaded again. This only happens in Safari. The demo is here (Sorry. Link is no longer active). Every time you load the page all the files get downloaded again. This is even more obvious watching the network traffic using Windows Task Manager. ( to call up the task manager and select the Networking Tab.) Testing this further I went to Apple.com, loaded the home page went to a couple others on the site, watched a video. You can see it all downloading using the networking tool. visit the same pages again and everything is in cache. There is no further downloading traffic. This makes no sense.

Yes. I thought of that. I don't have experience with shared objects but from what I understand there would be problems. For instance, when a file is flushed from the cache there is no way I know to update the shared object's record. A better approach might be to build a database at the beginning of each session. I could build a LoaderMax queue of all possible files I may want to queue up. I could load the queue but stop each loader after xx ms. Those files already in cache would complete and could be marked as such in an array or dictionary. All others would be assumed to not be cached. I would have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out exactly how to make that work on the wide variety of systems out there. It's an idea, anyway.

In my case I build 360VR tours that may consist of a couple dozen nodes (views), each a couple MB in size. The user may have viewed one or a couple separately, say as a sample in a different part of the site. Now they view the full tour and that sample view sits near the end of the queue. But say the user decides to jump straight to it. It would already be in cache. LoaderMax wouldn't know. I hope that is clear, but it may not matter. There is no flag that will tell you the file is in cache if it hasn't already been processed by LoaderMax. If testing the download speed of a file sample is the only way it may get complex and not be worth the overhead of running such a test.

Yes. Already doing that. But if LoaderMax hasn't gotten to that particular file in its queue it still won't know if it is cached or not. Status will be "ready" either way. I was hoping that something like auditSize() could report if the file was cached as well as its byte size by some cleaver method.

Jack, Is there a way for LoaderMax to test if a file is already in the browser cache and let you know? Here's what I'm thinking: You build a preloading queue. A file request comes. Normally, if it is a significant file, you want to pause/cancel the queue giving all available bandwidth to download the requested file ASAP. In doing so you loose all the data currently downloading but not yet finished and you have to start again once the requested file is finished. BUT, if the file is already in the browser cache stopping the queue is entirely unnecessary. Flash would quickly pull the file from cache. LoaderMax could keep going with no pause, no loss of data or time.... if you only knew.

Jack, Do you have Nvidia or ATI video card. I'm guessing not ATI. Weirdly, ATI drivers may be the culprit. Or not. Still investigating.

Jack, Thanks for checking. Just to be certain, you did go into Flash's full screen mode by clicking the FULLSCREEN button on the bottom right? As for prioritizing graphics rendering, could be. But why it would be something unique to full screen mode I don't understand. In any case, I could understand it maxing out the GPU, but my CPU cores are only pulling about 50%. I expect that would have more relevance. I doubt there would be some disk accessing unique to full screen mode so I can't imagine there is any disk access battle going on. So far I've only tried this on my development machine, a quad core PC, WinXP32, FF3.6 and shoot! I realize I should have tested more before sending you my earlier post. I just tested several more browsers and now find that the problem is quite distinct in FF3.6 and Chrome 8 but not in Safari 5 and IE8. I'll bet you didn't test with FF or Chrome. With that in mind it looks more like this is a Flash/Browser issue. Time to give Adobe another bug report, although it won't get the sort of attention you give your users. Darn! That is like a quarter of users will have issues unless I can find a workaround. Actually it is more than half of my visitors. BTW, if you thought what you saw was interesting, check out the full Taliesin tour, http://www.tourdeforce360.com/taliesin.

Jack, I'm building a pre-loading plugin for a virtual tour application using LoaderMax. It is working beautifully except for one serious and perplexing thing. When Flash is in full screen mode and the virtual tour image is in motion, downloading slows to a crawl. This only happens in Flash's full screen mode. If you take the browser window to full screen (using F11) the image is the same size but there is no slowing of downloading. And it only happens when the image is moving. I've put together a demo illustrating the problem here: (Example no longer up. Sorry). The image starts moving after four seconds. You can stop it for four seconds by clicking the image. The meter in the upper left shows how many KB have been downloaded in the last second. There is about 22MB in total. Of course you must keep clearing your brwoser cache and reloading the page with each run. You will notice that the download speed stays relatively constant whether or not the image is moving. Now take it to full screen mode by clicking the FULLSCREEN button in the lower right. Notice how the download speed is relatively high unless the image moves. Then speed plummets. Any clue how to get around this? I'm not sure even where to start. Scott

Doesn't it feel good to solve at least one impossible puzzle per day?? That was a weird one. Or had I set the numbers to strings in the first place and used those as the names I gather it would have worked fine. I am curious that it works with the older version of LoaderMax, however. And yes, it didn't crash Flash. My bad. It threw errors which stopped Flash if you run the debug version. BIG thanks for making the code change.

Jack, Don't you have a magic wand or something you can just wave? I didn't have time to assemble what was needed yesterday but just sent a PM with everything to reproduce the problem with comparison between the old and current class versions. Looking forward to hearing what you find out. And thanks so much for the very quick and effective customer service. Seriously, you are the best.