Slick Forums

Hi all,

Are there any commonly-used patterns for loading assets in background threads? Before going and re-inventing the wheel, I thought I'd check to see if the problem has already been solved.

In particular I need to load TiledMaps and images from a webserver. The actual loading is straightforward enough, but I'm wondering about loading these in a background thread whilst having a different gamestate display a loading animation. In XNA-land it was a performance problem to draw at the same time as loading textures because of some lock on the GraphicsDevice... Are there any such gotchas in Slick2D/LWJGL?

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Deejay
BinaryTweed.com - New games that are like old games, but better
IndieCity.com - Playing a different game

It's been done before, but it takes a bit of work. You can't call GL from a different thread, so you'll need to load the image separately data using LoadableImageData. Then, with the ByteBuffer and ImageData, you will pass that to GL via InternalTextureLoader to actually create the texture. I'd recommend using the latest dev branch version of Slick.

I'm not sure how this would be implemented using TiledMap as I've never used that class myself.

Hi Davedes,

Thanks for the reply! That doesn't sound as straightforward as I was naively hoping for.

Apologies for my ignorance, but is that GL as in OpenGL, or something else? Are you aware of any code samples implementing the technique you described?

Thanks again for your help.

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Deejay
BinaryTweed.com - New games that are like old games, but better
IndieCity.com - Playing a different game

I wrote a library which does async/background texture loading: http://twl.l33tlabs.org/textureloader/ (still needs a website).

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

Ooh, thanks Matthias! When I get around to implementing this bit, I'll certainly give it a try and let you know how I get on.

Is there any documentation for how it should be used?

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Deejay
BinaryTweed.com - New games that are like old games, but better
IndieCity.com - Playing a different game

In the javadoc - but it's not really compatible with Slick at all.

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

Shouldn't be hard to make it work with slick. Load the textures with TextureLoader, and once they loaded successfully, wrap them as Slick textures. Then just create a new Slick Image based on the wrapped texture.

http://pastebin.com/Wv28XsL3

Don't forget to call from the main loop - see the javadoc of the TextureManager for details. Otherwise nothing will work.

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

Is there a way to load audio files asynchronously?