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New Bounty Hunter Flash Site 23 Oct, 2002 / Comments: 11

By DJG


LucasArts.com has been updated with a new product spotlight for Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, which briefly appeared on Friday, disappeared on Saturday, and has now returned. The new site contains wallpaper, icons, and some interesting info. For example, it seems the big bad guard from The Shawshank Redemption is providing the voice of one of the main characters.

Dare I say it, but this site is a fairly good example of how Flash can effectively be used for web design in a non-annoying way.
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11 Comments

  • telarium on 23 Oct, 2002, 10:47…
    I do agree that the text should have been selectable. I always do selectable text in Flash. Draggable scroll bars aren't too hard either.

    However, I like that each page is on a seperate .swf file. That means you can use the browser's back button instead of accidentally hitting it and then having to reload the entire Flash site again and start over on your navigation.

    I didn't say it was a perfect example, anyway. I only said it was "fairly good."
  • twifkak on 23 Oct, 2002, 11:20…
    Good point about the separate files. I think they should've kept the header (with the buttons and all) as a separate file from the content, so that data common to all the pages doesn't have to be loaded for each page, and can be cached by the browser. Maybe use an iframe to store the content swf, so a little of the screen-goes-black-between-pages goes away. Ooh! I'm like a boy at a ball park, except it's a ball park filled with people speaking computerese.
  • telarium on 23 Oct, 2002, 13:12…
    Yeah, it is possible to have external symbols in Flash, which I believe would be stored in the browser's cache. But ah well. I'll refrain from any more armchair web design.
  • twifkak on 23 Oct, 2002, 10:41…
    I dare to disagree. It hasn't made the text selectable (I'm not a Flash programmer, but I've seen it done before). You can only scroll up and down via arrow (no box to drag). When you click on a link (*any* link) inside the flash content, it has to load a new .html page. (They should've consolidated the content into one swf, and then prefetched all the other content while the user is viewing the main page.)

    To sum up:
    1)Can't select.
    2)Can't scroll by dragging.
    3)Majority of content is nothing but text and pictures.
    4)Each "page" is on a separate .swf file.

    It seems like it's begging to be HTML. If they really want the flashy buttons up top, *they* could be in Flash, and the rest HTML. If they really want *all* the content to be in Flash, they should give us a reason. (Add some neato Flash-exclusive content, or enable transitions from one page to another, without that annoying screen-goes-black-for-a-second from HTML, for example.)

    And that's my US dollar.
  • Remi O on 23 Oct, 2002, 10:45…
    Just for the record, I agree with all of that.
  • Jake on 23 Oct, 2002, 10:57…
    I also agree with Andrew's reply.
  • twifkak on 23 Oct, 2002, 11:16…
    I agree with Jake.
  • Remi O on 23 Oct, 2002, 13:37…
    I kinda don't.
  • twifkak on 23 Oct, 2002, 14:14…
    I agree.
  • spaff on 23 Oct, 2002, 15:45…
    so we've reached an agreement?
  • twifkak on 24 Oct, 2002, 06:38…
    That, and the universe is about to cave in.