PRELOADING OF SCENES ETC

[Smourt]

Has anyone had any success in loading content while the tour is loading?

So, no one wants a big skin, which is going to slow down the initial start of the tour.

What I would like to do is load the skin and obviously the first scene, but then load the remaining scenes in the background while the user is viewing the first scene.

I have not actionscript knowledge so that is out... The other way I thought of was to externalise the skin and then load the scene files using javascript. There are several problems associated with this...

you cant externalise more than one scene, as the code and numbering of the scene files are identical, ok so you could put them in differnet folders and link via the html files as oposed to the swf files... so... I got that to work... but for sume reason I cant get any scripts to work where it preloads the files...Does anyone have a suitable preload script that they have used and DOES WORK?

I have 5 scenes that I would like to load, I have always been annoyed with the idea of viewing one area, then waiting while the next area loads then viewing that area and so on and so on...

Thanks

Regards

Stephan

[smooth]

It hasn't ever really been on my hit list but this Easypano thread might be of interest.

Regards, Smooth

[Smourt]

Hey smooth

I have used a couple of scripts thinking that the work differently, or that I am just cr@p at implementing them but none of them actually seem to work WITH pan2vr... SO I clear my cache... no files. Load the page with the script... JPG files are in the cache... cool... then I open the html page, which was externalised... Same ol' same ol' it loads exactly the same a before no faster, even though the images have been preloaded into cache..

what is with that???

Smooth why would you not want to cache the files? You think it creates an issue with CPU or ram?

Stephan

[smooth]

Smooth why would you not want to cache the files? You think it creates an issue with CPU or ram?

No I wouldn't think so. I just haven't seen the need for it since aDSL came about. Everything loads fast enough for me.
What have you got that really needs caching? How large is your skin? Have you done enough to optimise it?

If a pano is say 1.5mb+ a couple of hundred kilobytes in a skin isn't going to make much difference.
I can see a case for caching pop-up large high quality images or maybe the next .swf scene but outside I that, I don't see why it's needed.
A skin shouldn't be very large at all.

Maybe I'd have a better understanding if I knew more about your tour.

Regards, Smooth

[Smourt]

I am doing a wine farm which would like background sound, directional sound, popup images and popup window with video.
ASKING FOR A LOT I KNOW...

SO...
The skin is not big, in all about 250kb.
The popup images are not an issue either, 50kb here and there (external to skin)...
The sound is not that much of an issue either (all externalised) range from 40Kb to 200Kb between 32 to 128 kbit/s depending on quality.
The video is the issue, around 2.5Mb each x 3. The video illustrates activities in that area, so the video takes a while to download, so if the user moves to next scene, then the next scene takes ages to load because it is loading both the video and the scene.

So my thoughts were to preload the video... that is stupid cos the entire tour would take longer, or I can structure the tour so that the scenes around the video are already loaded, so when they select the video, the areas surrounding the video will already be loaded and will give the something to look at while the video loads...

Whats your thoughts?

[Noisy]

Can you clarify how you are loading things in the first place? what are the scripts you refer to?

[Noisy]

This might be of use
http://www.pageresource.com/jscript/jpreload.htm
Should work for any asset with a bit of adaption, mind you I havn't tried it for a swf file.

[visual360media]

So the video is in the tour? Is that the problem?
My thoughts, when i visit sites with videos, unless i am really interested in the sites content and desperate to watch the vid,
i just leave the site, cannot be bothered to wait ! Now, a nicely done tour, slowly loading in front of my eyes, well, i wait for it to load..

[anahum]

Smourt, check if 360panogallery does what you need.

[smooth]

I should think the use of a .flv streaming file used in conjunction with a .swf wrapper would be the way to feed the video files.
Pre-loading rather large files presents a few issues, I personally wouldn't want my bandwidth chewed up with a video file that I may not even bother to view.
Of course you have covered the fact doing so slows the loading of the next panorama scene to a crawl.

In what format is your video files currently?

Regards, Smooth

[Smourt]

The player is an swf with video being an flv, compressed as much as possible... SADLY the only further way to optimise is the use of preloading... and this seems to be an obstacle.