Splash screen in standalone - too long to show

[Marian Petrides]

One thing I just experimented with is an extremely basic "hub" 
standalone--that works pretty well

My "Title Page" has a fairly long embedded piece of music, so it takes 
10-15 seconds to load off HD, longer off HD.  Instead of using this 
stack as my standalone hub, if I create a minimalist "hub" consisting 
simply of a window that says "Loading. Please wait." the launch time is 
minimal off HD (not tested from CD yet) and the user at least has 
something on his screen letting him know why he's waiting.

The other advantage of this is that one does not have to recompile the 
Title Page each time it is revised.  One very basic hub standalone and 
then everything else, including the title page, can remain in the form 
of non-standalone Rev files.

Marian




On Jun 21, 2004, at 10:26 AM, John Rule wrote:

> Thanks Richard...that explains some things.
>
> I also have a few substacks in this stack, so it might help to break 
> this up
> a bit. My expectation was that I have control over the subatcks that 
> are
> loaded. I suppose the 'code' for the substacks (which is embedded in my
> splash screen) is being loaded with the splash screen whether it is 
> used or
> not...about 2 megabytes worth of stuff.
>
> When my splash screen opens, I have a progress bar that advances as I
> manually open each substack, getting it ready for the environment. If I
> don't do this, the stack is not available...I wonder if there is some 
> other
> initialization going on for substacks regardless of whether they are 
> used or
> not? Is the code just being loaded, or are they being opened 
> 'internally',
> but not open to the user? That would also explain my overhead!
>
> Maybe an option to NOT load substack code until it is called for? That 
> would
> allow me to keep my single file application intact...which is still a 
> unique
> feature to RunRev AFAIK.
>
> JR
>
>
>
>> Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 11:46:11 -0700
>> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
>> Subject: Re: Splash screen in standalone - too long to show
>> To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>> Message-ID: <40D5DB73.6070706 at fourthworld.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>>
>> John Rule wrote:
>>
>>> I am finding that the fastest I can get my splash screen to show
>>> is about 8 seconds...that seems a little long compared to any
>>> 'real' app.
>>
>> Unless it's made by Adobe or Macromedia, where the launch times will
>> commonly run between 30 and 60 seconds. ;)
>>
>>> I know the RunRev engine has to load, and do it's internal stuff,
>>> but this is just on the border of being annoying to the user (me)
>>> in my opionion.
>>
>> I'm a big fan of snappy launch times.  Made myself somewhat unpopular 
>> on
>> a Big Corporate Software Vendor list by raising the issue there, 
>> asking
>> if maybe it was time for some optimization (note to self: never 
>> mention
>> optimization to engineers forced to succumb to a marketing VP's
>> unbridled lust for featuritis).  Seems it's kind of a sore spot with
>> developers stuck using bloated frameworks (ah, the special hell that 
>> is
>> developing in a Big Corporate environment; not everyone has it as good
>> as we Rev developers. :)
>>
>>> Are there any tricks to getting a stack to display right away in a
>>> standalone? Maybe an option in the RunRev engine to do this?
>>
>> A small raw stack (no initialization scripts of any kind) turned into 
>> a
>> standalone opens in well under half a second on my modest 1GHz
>> single-processor Mac (PB 4G; Dock set to not animate launches; 768MB
>> RAM).  So the engine load time itself seems pretty darn quick.
>>
>> Things that can affect launch time include:
>>
>> - The size of the standalone stack: objects need to be read from
>>    disk and unpacked in memory, so bigger stacks will take longer.
>>
>> - Other people's initialization:  Are you using any Rev libraries?
>>    If not, does removing them from the build process result in a
>>    faster launch?
>>
>> - Your own initialization:  What does your app do before the line
>>    that shows the splash screen?
>>
>>
>> -- 
>>   Richard Gaskin
>>   Fourth World Media Corporation
>
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