What is the most efficient way to load all the textures?

Question

I am developing a game (in Java) that is going to have a lot of textures and images in it.

What is the most efficient way to load all the textures? I was thinking on pre-loading all the images instead of loading them during runtime (because during runtime they will be loaded over and over again).

I'll be happy to hear your opinion on those strategies, and also, if you have a better strategy I would like to hear that.

Answer 1

The question you have to ask yourself is, how often will the textures be used? Based on the answer you have a few options:

• If multiple textures are expected to be visible on the screen at the same time, they all have to be pre-loaded, and remain in memory until they are drawn.
• If multiple textures are part of different areas of your game (like on different levels) then you can pre-load all textures on the current level, and once the user moves to the next level, unload previous assets and load the ones on the new level.
• In the case of an open-world game, where the line between the two choices above are slightly blurred, divine the map into "chunks", and when moving to a new chunk, un-load all assets on the previous one, and load the ones on the new chunk.

For most machines out there, the best you can do is pre-load as much as possible. If you are worried that a machine might run out of memory, maybe you'd have to ask yourself if using less textures, or smaller textures is preferred.