Pre-loaded art. Can someone give me a detailed explination to how this feature works? :)

ozboybrian

^^^^^ Thanks whoever! lol

Edit - they really need to make the Category choice blank and not postable until you select the category yourself.

SlickZero

It's to help with loading times of your game. Everything that has this option checked will be pre-loaded when you start the game. So if everything is pre-loaded, it will take forever for the game itself to open up because it's loading all of the images in the game at the beginning. If you un-check this option, the images associated will no be pre-loaded, and will load when they are called upon automatically in the game.

Best practice seems to be to only check Pre-Load Art when it's something that is in the beginning of the game, like the background, and main actors. Things that aren't on the initial scene loading can be un-checked.

For example, on my new game, the only thing that is pre-loaded is the main actor, the background, and the platforms. Everything else is unchecked, and I think the game loads pretty fast.

ozboybrian

Very nice! Great answer mate, thanks for coming to the rescue once again.

I would think to do it on the main actor at times, because he can have a lot of animations....
What happens if you uncheck it on an actor that is at the beginning of the scene, is it a white box for a moment while it loads?

SlickZero

I haven't noticed that happening. Actors that aren't pre-loaded seem to show up in time, and I haven't seen a white box yet. Even on a 3GS.

ozboybrian

So what's the downfall of not having the main actor / BG not pre load art? : )

SlickZero

Possibly not being there at startup, and suddenly popping in after a couple of seconds after the game starts. If your main actor is animated, it could just show the first frame for a couple of seconds as well, and then start animating after it's loaded. But a background not being there when the game starts could look real bad in my opinion. GameSalad even says it's not a good idea to leave everything un-checked. You'll have to play around with it and find that happy medium where your game starts up fast enough, and there not being any graphic glitches, like images not being there when the game starts up.

ozboybrian

Yeah true and sounds good.

You could probs get your main character to "Start off stage" for example... Then "walk" on. Depending on the game but yeah.

calvin9403

You can also do this(I think, have not use gamesalad for a long time) , preload art is an attribute, so preload it after 1 secs or something like that

Calvin

ozboybrian

Oh really? That's pretty good then.

Thanks Cal!

DigiChain

Picking up on this thread...

@ slickzero: you say ticked pre-loaded images will be loaded at the begining of the game... surely its preloaded at the begining of the scene?.. as I have many scenes with differing art/images in each.

Also - anyone know if there's still a best-practices post about pre-loading? I can't find anything on this new forum!

Lastly - I just watched a video on cookbook about preloading, and when all pre-loads were off the scene started pretty much immediately and displayed no different to if they were pre-loaded. So whats the downside to not pre-loading! White boxes? glitches? framerate issues?

ozboybrian

@Digi-chaing

It's supposed to be white boxes they reckon... (when the scene first loads)

DigiChain

Well, I may as well share my results for using pre-load art on / off:

Basically after experimenting with turning ALL pre-load art off the my entire game (which consists of over 50 scenes), I notice a very small improvement in load time when game firsts loads - probably loads in 3 seconds rather than 4. Other than that no difference whatsoever. All scene loads are exactly the same.

So my conclusion - not worth using, particularly if it could potentially introduces glitches etc.
Hopefully its more beneficial for other peoples projects.

JohnPapiomitis

Your not supposed to turn it off on everything. Any actors that are in the scene already with a set image should have preload art checked. Pre load off doesnt change the actor to a white box or anytthing like that, it just specifies when the image should be loaded. When the scene starts, or when the image is called upon in the game. So if you have something in the scene already with a image, you want that actor to have pre load art on, so it loads the image in during game load, and not loading it in after the game starts. That can actually make things slower and Youll most likely see better load improvements after fixing that.

cheers

DigiChain

So just to clarify, is pre-load art something that's done at the start of loading a game? And not when individual scenes are loaded?

It would therefore explain why there's no difference in load times between scenes... and since there's hardly any difference in loadtime when loading the game I won't be using it anyway.

tenrdrmer

PRe-load art should be happening at each scene load you won't notice much difference though unless you have animation heavy actors. I don't think it applies to the set image only changes and animations in your rule set.