ImageLoader class for Flash 8

Thursday 17 August 2006  –  Filed under: Flash  –  12 Comments

ActionScript iconThis piece of code has been lying around for some time. I wrote it due to the fact that Flash 8 doesn’t smooth dynamically loaded images by default. This means that scaling and rotating any dynamically loaded image will make it look “jagged”.

The first (for as far as I know) to write Flash code to circumvent this issue was Master Tinic Uro himself; he is one of the engineers at Adobe working on the Flash Player. He wrote a handy function to load an image dynamically and then smooth it using a neat BitmapData / MovieClip trick

I wrapped his idea and some extras (events from MovieClipLoader class are relayed and the PNG transpareny solution is also included) in a single class I dubbed ImageLoader (duh).

Usage is as follows:

var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader();
loader.addListener(this);
loader.loadImage( "some_image.jpg", some_mc );

In the sample above, the ‘this’ context will receive all events normally fired by the MovieClipLoader class while loading an image.

ImageLoader smoothing

This entry was posted on Thursday 17 August 2006 at 15:52 and is filed under Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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12 Responses

  1. Eliramalho says:
    Wednesday 22 August 2007 at 21:15

    Many thanks for sharing your work and effort.
    I also don’t like open flash to view flv files.

    Thanks and good job for you.
  2. Lîtus says:
    Sunday 2 September 2007 at 12:22

    Thanks a lot for that piece of code. I’ve been searching some of this for two weeks ago. I also found some script for solve this problem (using class BitmapData), you can read about it in my blog (in spanish…).
    [http://www.evostudio.com/litus-host/litus-blog/lb_02/post.php?view_p_id=47]

    Bye!
  3. Luke says:
    Wednesday 31 October 2007 at 04:41

    Very useful piece of code, thanks for that.

    Only unfortunate issue is that it seems to slow Flash down a lot. Is this built into newer (9+) versions of the player, I remember Tinic mentioning a more native smoothing function?
  4. Joakim says:
    Tuesday 13 May 2008 at 20:38

    Ran into a couple problems using this script as we needed to load images across domains in a flash banner ad.

    1) The mLoader instance within the class has no parent MovieClip, and triggers sandbox violations when loading images across domains. Replacing the constructor function remedies the problem:

    public function ImageLoader ( targetMc:MovieClip ) {
    targetMc.mcLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
    mLoader = targetMc.mcLoader;
    addListener(this);
    }

    2) This requires a change in the instantiation code, as the parent(ing) movieClip needs to be passed as an argument:

    1. var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader(this);
    2. loader.loadImage( “some_image.jpg”, some_mc );

    3) We removed this line in the instantiation script:

    loader.addListener(this);

    The listener is added immediately within the class in the constructor function, so this seems redundant?

    Hope this can be used by others needing Flash 8 dynamic bitmap smoothing, and thanks Martijn!
  5. João says:
    Thursday 5 June 2008 at 12:51

    I’m having some problems with the class. I´m loading the class into a another one:

    import com.planche.ImageLoader;

    and then on a function:

    public function setImage(l:String):Void
    {
    var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader(this);
    loader.loadImage(l, img_mc); // where l is a string coming from loaded xml
    }

    I’ve made some tracing and the l string is ok, but the image doesn’t load… any help or any problem found..
  6. João says:
    Thursday 5 June 2008 at 13:59

    problem solved :D

    public function setImage(l:String):Void
    {
    var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader(this);
    loader.loadImage(l.toString(), img_mc); // where l is a string coming from loaded xml
    }
  7. matt says:
    Monday 8 December 2008 at 16:42

    excellent class. This really is a very handy bit of code. Thanks.
  8. Michael says:
    Wednesday 24 December 2008 at 00:13

    Wonderful, wonderful class. It made a world of a difference and was ridiculously easy to implement. Bravo!
  9. asri says:
    Monday 25 May 2009 at 13:57

    how if i want to load more than one image, and in my case i want to add my own listener.,could i?

    Thanks
  10. Doug says:
    Sunday 25 October 2009 at 21:29

    I pasted the code into the timeline and it doesn’t work for me.

    What am I doing wrong? I have a feeling it has to do with “classes” – I’m new to classes.

    The error message returned was:
    Error Scene=Scene 1, layer=action, frame=1:Line 3: The class or interface ‘ImageLoader’ could not be loaded.
    var loader:ImageLoader = new ImageLoader();
  11. Doug says:
    Sunday 25 October 2009 at 21:41

    It’s still not working – I even created an .as file called ImageLoader.as and pasted Tinic Uro’s code into it – is that what you wanted us to do?

    Now, the error message I’m getting is:
    Line 42: ActionScript 2.0 class scripts may only define class or interface constructs.
    }

    I use Flash Pro 8.

    Thanks
  12. Doug says:
    Sunday 25 October 2009 at 21:49

    Thanks – problem solved.

    I’m an idiot that doesn’t use classes very often – you might want to specifically instruct people to create an ImageLoader.as file and paste the linked code into it because it took me all afternoon to figure out what was going wrong.

    The code works great though, thanks!

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