Adding an intro to a swf without access to the fla OR: differences between top-level and loaded swfs

Question

I've got to (quickly!) add an intro to an existing flash masthead on a site that I've inherited. I don't have access to the source .fla's, so I approached the problem by putting the intro in a wrapper swf and loading the current masthead and adding it to the display list on Event.INIT. So far, so good. (Incidentally, the swfs are built for flash player 9 and use AS3.)

The problem I'm having is that although the intro plays fine and loads / displays the beginning of the masthead swf, which is a loading animation, the masthead itself never actually plays. Essentially, my question is: what would cause an actionscript 3-based swf to behave differently when it's the child of another swf as opposed to at the top level of the embedded swf?

Potentially important details: Embedding is being handled with swfobject, and no flashvars are being passed in. There are two params, which are base: "/flash/" and wmode: "opaque". All the swfs and flash data live in /flash/. The flash elements (minus the intro I built) were constructed using the Inky flash framework, with which I'm not familiar.

UPDATE: I've reconsidered my approach to the problem and gotten it working by using ExternalInterface; I'm having the intro swf call a js function when it finishes playing, which swaps out the intro swf and replaces it with the current masthead (the approach is outlined here). I'd still like to know why I was witnessing the behavior I was seeing earlier, though, so any ideas and suggestions would be welcome.

Answer 1

There could be a couple of potential problems with your flash files.

If your swf was compiled in AS2, it could be referencing _root which would be messed up when it is loaded into another swf. In AS2, you can get around it by using _lockroot. In AS3, this is not longer a problem because _lockroot is inheritted.

If your movie was a timeline based movie, you can try to invoke the play() function.

If your intro loads external assets, you will want to make sure your paths are set correctly for all your external assets. Try to put the swf file of your container and the intro in to the same directory. Or troubleshoot by using the Safari Activity window to see if you have any "404 not found".

Another thing is inconsistent flash version. You could run into problem if you load a Flash version 9 with a Flash version 10.

Hope these pointers help.