Preload art as a Change Attribute?

hotMagic

Is it possible to set Preload art to false, and then fire off Preload art= true in a change attribute, say .5 seconds after the scene starts?

Because in the best practices, he says you should use change image and that Dummy image. Well as many have mentioned, that's not practical until you are pretty much done with the game.

We have actors with small base images (so the primary image is not the issue) but they have lot's of animations.

Just wondering because this wasn't mentioned in best practices.

GameTeamOne

You won't really need to worry about the dummy/null image if your base image is fairly efficient to begin with. You are probably safe going with your original base image, especially if you are still doing your core development.

I think many are taking the TIPS portion of the best practices as law, and that's a miscommunication on my part. Using a NULL image or any shared base image for all actors that are visible at the beginning of your scene is a terrific way to shave visible time off of your scene load, but is definitely not practical if you are editing your gameplay.

In my honest opinion, you should probably wait and do your full game optimization later on in your development. Since so much is likely to change up until the point the game is feature complete it will prevent you from doing a ton of re-work. There is not a whole lot of reason to polish up a scene if it is still being prototyped and designed.

Optimization and polish can take a really long time and requires a lot of patience. Keep it up and thank you for your post.

hotMagic

Thanks for the response. I think my question is, does it function in this manner? As in, if I uncheck preload art, then turn it to true at a given time, will it load all the associated ChangeImage and Animate images at that moment?

tenrdrmer

I would imagine preload art is not something that can be changed on the fly. It is what it is when the game is loaded. No changing afterwards. I could be wrong though.

hotMagic

tenrdrmer, that was my impression as well, but im trying to nail down the exact way this thing works.
Acorrding to Billy's best practices post and the forum post about the release, it sounds like these are true:
-non preloaded actors still show their base image if they're present, but don't load Animate or Change image assets until one of those actions are called. At that point, it loads ALL of them for that actor.

Is that right? Because im seeing base images for actors with that turned off.

tenrdrmer

as I under stand it only stops the loading of animation frames and extra change image actors. Base images will always be loaded. If you want to remove those as well then you need to do the transparent image on all your actors and change to your base image once loaded.

hotMagic

right. ok. so there isn't really a way to load all the anim and Change image stuff, unless you, for example, make the object invisible and animate it once?