Chapter 17. Loading External Assets

One of Flash's greatest strengths is that it allows you to dynamically load all of a project's media assets bitmaps, sounds, even other movies, from external sources. As a result, a greater range of content can exist externally from the movie (such as on a Web server) and be loaded into the movie on an as-needed basis. This means you can now deliver more dynamic content than ever before, since your movie's content is not restricted to what is placed in it at the time it was authored!

In this lesson, we'll show you how the various types of media are loaded into a running movie, as well as how to work with and manipulate this external content once it has been loaded. As a result, you'll be able to greatly expand the content used in your own projects, without significantly increasing the time it takes for your user to download and view it.

In this lesson, we'll build the project shown here, which contains mostly dynamically loaded content.