Slick Forums

I've got a game that uses quite a lot of resources and am trying to optimise the time it needs to start up.
One thing that I'm trying is to load level backgrounds as the game progresses because there are 50 large images, many of which the player wont see unless they get very far, so it seems pointless to load them all at the beginning.

The problem is that the game obviously stops rendering while loading the image, which leads to an annoying lag. Is there any way to avoid this? I've tried streaming them, but the lag still occurs when the actual image object is created.
My temporary solution is to simply cover up all animated objects with a tutorial screen, but that's not ideal.

Another thing that's semi related is the issue of the maximum size of images used as SpriteSheets. Do I need to look out for the OpenGL texture size limit when creating them? The thing I worry about is whether older graphics cards will be able to handle this kind of thing. What tends to be the lowest common denominator in regards to maximum texture size?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Should keep your images under 512x512 if possible. If not use BigImage.

You can thread loading of image data, but not Image creation (since that actually creates the texture in GL). The really heavy bit should be the loading from disk though.

Kev