Pre-loading images

Armelline

Hey all,

So I've got a game that's taking much longer to load than really acceptable - perhaps 7 or 8 seconds. Nothing complicated is happening on startup, just loading a few attributes, so I'm assuming the delay is being caused by the number of images loaded. Unfortunately, it's a single screen game (or at least 95% happens on one scene) so turning off pre-loading of art really doesn't help much.

Any good tips for optimising loading times?

A lot of the images loaded aren't immediately visible - only when the player moves from the title screen to the gameplay screen. I could set a significant portion of them to invisible to start with, if that will help. Does GameSalad load the image for a present but alpha 0 actor on startup?

Seems silly a 20mb game with minimal processing is taking so long to load. Must be a way to speed things up

JSproject

"Does GameSalad load the image for a present but alpha 0 actor on startup?"
Yes they are loaded (looks like memory is allocated for the full pixel size of them).

"A lot of the images loaded aren't immediately visible - only when the player moves from the title screen to the gameplay screen. "
Try unchecking pre load art for the actors that are not initially used though.

Armelline

@JSproject said:
"Does GameSalad load the image for a present but alpha 0 actor on startup?"
Yes they are loaded (looks like memory is allocated for the full pixel size of them).

Unfortunate. Perhaps I'll have to look into spawning them over the first few seconds after the app is loaded.

"A lot of the images loaded aren't immediately visible - only when the player moves from the title screen to the gameplay screen. "
Try unchecking pre load art for the actors that are not initially used though.

I've unchecked preload art for everything, didn't make any difference at all to the loading time.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Do you have a splash screen? Preload should take place during the splash screen for the first scene or your only scene. You could try some of the new image formats for GS in which the images are less compressed as you are only at 20mb this will speed things up.